Mac Barnett| Longreads | May 5, 2026 | 3,941 words (16 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett, which was published by Little, Brown and Company on May 5, 2026.
This is me when I was a kid:
Courtesy of Mac Barnett
That’s not a real book. I don’t mean in the “Are children’s books real books?” sense. It’s fake, a prop I picked out from a box at the photography studio instead of a football or basketball or soccer ball, because I loved to read. Or, to be precise, I loved books. When that picture was taken, I was three years old. I didn’t know how to read. I was just pretending. It was make-believe.
