Go the Fuck to Sleep (Hardcover)

Go the Fuck to Sleep By Adam Mansbach (Text by), Ricardo Cortés (Illustrator) Cover Image

Go the Fuck to Sleep (Hardcover)

By Adam Mansbach (Text by), Ricardo Cortés (Illustrator)

$15.95


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The #1 New York Times bestseller—a gift book for parents that will have them laughing even as they cry.


One of Reader's Digest's "25 Funniest Books of All Time"

"Nothing has driven home a certain truth about my generation, which is approaching the apex of its childbearing years, quite like this." —New Yorker


"A parenting zeitgeist" —Washington Post


"A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go to sleep." —National Public Radio


"A new Bible for weary parents" —New York Times


"Resonates powerfully with almost everyone" —Boston Globe


Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award–winning author Adam Mansbach's verses perfectly capture the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.


With illustrations by Ricardo Cortés, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wittingly funny—a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.



Adam Mansbach is a novelist, screenwriter, humorist, and cultural critic (in addition to having built an obscene fake children's book empire). His books include Rage Is Back, the California Book Award–winning The End of the Jews, and the best sellers Angry Black White Boy and For This We Left Egypt?, cowritten with Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. Mansbach was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his screenplay for the Netflix Original Barry, and is currently adapting his middle-grade novel Jake the Fake Keeps It Real for the Disney Channel. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and on National Public Radio's This American Life, the Moth, and All Things Considered.

RICARDO CORTÉS is the #1 New York Times best-selling illustrator of Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Party: A Mystery, by the acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid. Cortés has written and illustrated books including Sea Creatures from the Sky and A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and on CNN, Fox News, and the Late Show with David Letterman. You can see his work at Rmcortes.com, or on Twitter and Instagram at @Rmcortes. His latest work is the updated edition of It’s Just a Plant.
Product Details ISBN: 9781617750250
ISBN-10: 1617750255
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication Date: June 14th, 2011
Pages: 32
Language: English
Delightfully obscene.
— Newsweek

By any definition, the subversive Go the Fuck to Sleep—in which a desperate father cajoles his child to please, please, slip off into dreamland—is a real game changer; it lets frazzled parents vicariously enjoy chastising their stubborn offspring with well-placed profanity while never uttering a harsh word aloud.

— Miami Herald

Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep is the most controversial picture book on the shelves. Exhausted by his own daughter Vivien’s tedious two-hour bedtime routine, Adam penned a would-be bedtime book that speaks the mind of beleaguered parents everywhere and the difficulties of getting your child to 'Go the Fuck to Sleep.'

— In Touch Weekly

Perfectly timed, lightly applied touches of profanity are funny. Super funny. It's especially the case when the profanity puts words to common feelings that we aren't really allowed to own up to. Well, in that spirit comes this perfect little picture-book parody.
— Booklist

Anyone who has ever had a newborn, an infant, a baby, a toddler, a preschooler . . . oh, heck, anyone who has ever known a young child will understand the impetus behind Adam Mansbach's runaway bestseller and 'children's book for adults.'
— Shelf Awareness

The bracing language may be earning it headlines, but its true appeal—and, I suspect, the reason it has caught on with the toddler-terrorised masses—lies in its unapologetic acknowledgment that early parenthood is a struggle, a state defined as often by frustration as delight. For the exhausted parent, nudged to the brink of sanity by lack of sleep, Go the Fuck to Sleep is more than a reason to snigger—it's a gesture of compassion.

— Daily Telegraph (UK)

Total genius.
— Jonathan Lethem, father of two, author of Motherless Brooklyn

Coverage from NPR