Every generation gets the children's book author it deserves. Today's tots have Adam Mansbach to inscribe the woes they inflict on their parents at bedtime. His smash hit Go the F**k to Sleep is of course aimed squarely at adults, which complicates the question of who deserves what, but that's another story, so let´s get the f**k on with it.

Mansbach replicates the helpless adorableness of toddler literature in 14 illustrated verses, only to sic a chorus of drunken sailors on each closing stanza. In solidarity with other bleary-eyed parents, the 30-something writer captures the fast ones that young children traditionally pull to evade sleep. 

All the kids from day care are in dreamland.
The froggie has made his last leap.
Hell no, you can't go to the bathroom.
You know where you can go? The fuck to sleep.

Go the F**k's birth has itself become the stuff of fable. Once upon a time...

Mansbach jested on Facebook, "Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, Go the F**k to Sleep.” His friends laughed heartily and encouraged him to really make a book. So one afternoon the grumpy dad sat down and wrote. He tried and tried to blow the leaked manuscript down (from the Internet). But its viral success made the book a bestseller prior to pub date.

Next thing he knew, Go the F**k to Sleep was on the bestseller lists in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly, and it's now being made into a movie. Mansbach, illustrator Ricardo Cortés and publisher Akashic Books are living happily ever after.  

Go the F**k had outsold Mansbach's entire literary canon around the time it was charting as a bestseller. This includes three novels -- Angry Black White Boy, Shackling Water and The End of the Jews -- and a poetry collection, Genius B-boy Cynics Getting Weeded in the Garden of Delights, as well as A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing.

On a recent morning when Mansbach was a bit sleep deprived -- through no fault of his offspring -- he shared his thoughts with JCCGreenwich.org.

Q: Children's books date back to Romanticism, which favored natural innocence over the power abuses of reason and progress. Talk about the comic tension you got from pitting idyllic nature against such profane bossiness as "go the f**k to sleep."

A: The juxtaposition I was interested in was that of the honest internal monologue going through the parent's mind while reading classic traditional bedtime stories and the dreamy, gauzy outer story.

Q: From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, the post-9/11 era quashed the notion of America the idealistic youth or even the nice parent. Does your book strike something in the zeitgeist that laments the withering of American innocence?

A: In my reading of history, long before 9/11 or Guantanamo Bay, America had ceased to be any kind of global nice guy, if we ever were. My take on American history is a lot less romantic than that. As a parent and a person in my mid 30s, I don´t feel like I lived through a loss of American innocence. I feel like I was born into an America that I never readily harbored any romantic notions about.

Most of my work before this book in the form of novels has dealt with things like race and identity and class and religion in this country. My own personal educational background has always focused on the inequities in American life. So I don't see these things as any kind of pivot point.

Q: We can start with 19th-century expansionism, and an obvious 20th-century hallmark was Vietnam, but for many Americans our preemptive warfare, legal and security complex and decline since 9/11 have led to a broader disillusionment. It's this more recent zeitgeist that I´m wondering if your book tapped into.

A: It´s interesting -- it's certainly possible. The fun thing for me about having tapped into the zeitgeist is having done so with no calculation and no intention. Of everything I've ever written, this is the thing I wrote with the fewest expectations -- which is to say zero. I am a writer so there is in the back of my mind the intention of publishing anything that I do write.

But this, unlike almost everything else, was something that I only gradually realized had any resonance outside of my own immediate family and circle of friends. So whatever the parenting zeitgeist is, it turns out to closely mirror what goes on in my own household. Certainly in my household that loss of innocence is not the crucial factor.

You may be onto something in the wider world, but for me, I think the critical thing that we as Americans do over and over is forget history, forget the past. Here we are a marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and a poll I read about a year ago indicated that less than 50 percent of the population was able to remember what year those events took place. It's a serial forgetting and a refusal to grapple with reality is one of the things that makes us quintessentially the people that we are!

Q: Nice plug for A Fictional History of the United States...

A: ...with Huge Chunks Missing. That was an anthology I edited. The idea there was expanding the canon, acknowledging that the way we do read history is very selective and manicured, and that there are a lot of critical moments left out of history but also a lot of critical takes on those crucial moments that go unrecorded. So we invited other fiction writers to write those moments into being.

Q: Isn't there a link to be made between what gets said in our history books and what gets said in our children's books?

A: Yes, I think that the critical reason the book was able to make inroads into the zeitgeist is that there is this culture of dishonesty or of being silent on matters that are painful or difficult in ways in which the private self doesn't jive with what we would like the public self to be. And particularly around parenting, I think that everybody is frustrated, but very few people speak with utter candor about it. That does tie into the way that as Americans we don't just forget, we forget willfully and are very selective in what we chose to insert into our own personal and national canons. So maybe that's the way in which the book connects with the 9/11 zeitgeist you're talking about.

Q: Would the book have been as warmly embraced had its author been female?

A: Certainly the response would have been different. It's harder for a woman to acceptably voice frustration and rage, particularly around parenting. People would be a lot quicker to snipe back and say things like, "Well, if you didn't want children, why did you have them?" At the same time I think that fathers are less visible in the culture of parenting, so in a way this book perhaps grants a little bit of additional presence to fathers.

Q: It lets off a special shot of steam on behalf of stay-at-home dads everywhere whose new colleagues have them in a choke-hold of PC protocol far more stringent than most workplaces actually demand.  

A: When I wrote the book, one of the very deliberate choices I did make was keeping the gender of the parent out of the verses entirely. I revised any gender pronoun that made its way into the book, which was one of the most difficult things about writing it. In terms of the illustrations, eventually -- on the second to the last page of the book -- you do see a father leaving the room. Obviously, I'm a father and people are going to associate fatherhood because of its author. But I really wanted to make it universal and keep gender out of it visually as long as possible and in the verses themselves entirely.

Q: How has the book been received abroad?

A: The response from men has been very enthusiastic. The book is now out in a number of cultures and coming out in many more. I´m waiting to see what the cultural fault lines are. So far the responses haven't really been any different here or in the UK or Australia or Germany or Brazil. I imagine at some point that will change when we move even farther afield and the Korean and Chinese versions come out, but we'll see.

Q: Folk tales were originally meant for the illiterate public, not for children, to invite popular participation in a way that the instructional texts didn´t. In researching for your book, did you look at the precedent of dark folk tales for grownups?

A: I did zero research of any kind in this book. I pretty much just sat down and wrote it in an afternoon. Afterwards I did some research and realized that the violence and lullabies are pretty intertwined. "Rockabye Baby" is a good example. Death and sleep are certainly related. The notion of scaring your kid into sleeping seems to have some cultural antecedents. Not that I'm trying to do that here, but there certainly is a history of children's stories and lullabies that have become very neutered and sweet and cute and innocent now, having been very different in the past -- and even in the present in other cultures. My daughter's mother is Swedish. By my American standards, Swedish children's stories are terrifying. Kids are dying and things do not go well. The Disneyfication and sanitizing of Hans Christian Andersen stories and Grimms' Fairy Tales; a lot of that stuff has always been pretty gruesome.

Q: A young parent once told me he was "hostage to terror" from the moment his kids were born. Could we say that your book is hostage's mutiny?

A: It makes some amount of sense to talk about it as revenge, but I prefer to think of it in terms of catharsis -- a kind of release and confirmation for parents that these sentiments are universal and acceptable. From a narrative perspective it's more of a turning of the camera. Parents are often off-screen and unrepresented in children's stories, and in this case we're pulling back from the close angle to the wide angle and getting not just the story and the child being told the story but the parent and the parent's own struggle.

Q: Could this book have resonated with The Greatest Generation, which was free to potch as many tuchases as it pleased?

A: Probably less so. I've gotten a lot of feedback from that generation indicating that they still remember feeling this way when they were putting their kids to bed, but there certainly was a much less precious culture of parenting. There are good and bad things about that.

Q: What can you tell us about the movie Fox 2000 is developing?

A: There's a writer/director who's been hired. I'm unfortunately not allowed to say his name yet, but I think he's a great choice. I have a pretty hands-off attitude towards the whole thing. Clearly the book has to be radically transformed to become a feature film, so I'm going to sit back and see what they do.

Q: What does your daughter know about the book?

A: She knows everything except the title and the refrain. She calls it Go to Sleep.

Q: What's your next book, and will you go back to serious novels?

A: I have a graphic novel coming out in the Spring called Nature of the Beast, which is an action sci-fi adventure; and my next novel is called Rage is Back, due out in January of 2013.