Go the F**k to Sleep

Adam Mansbach wrote this as a Facebook post in 2009, exhausted and at the end of his tether with a toddler who refused to sleep. The post went viral. A publisher called. The result is a picture book for adults — illustrated like a gentle children’s story, written in the soothing cadence of a lullaby, containing language that would absolutely not appear in any actual children’s book.

The genius is in the contrast. Each spread follows the same structure: a serene illustration of a sleeping natural world (the fish are asleep, the birds are asleep, the old oak tree is at rest), followed by a gentle rhyming description of said serenity, followed by the unfiltered internal monologue of a parent who has now asked the same child to close their eyes for the forty-seventh time tonight. The illustrations are beautiful. The text is deeply cathartic.

Every parent who has read this book has had the experience of reading it and feeling, for the first time, genuinely seen. The book validates the specific kind of exhausted love that involves loving someone very much and also desperately needing them to be unconscious for eight hours.

It was recorded as an audiobook by Samuel L. Jackson, which is the only correct choice, and the audiobook is if anything funnier than the physical book. Buy the book. Then look up the audiobook. Thank us later.