Is there something in the water? Within four months, three picture books and one YA novel inspired by Herman Melville’s best-known works are hitting shelves. Call it coincidence, call it kismet, but whatever-the-Ishmael you call it, the creators, working in different styles with wildly different relationships to the original stories, are giving young readers what may well be their first encounters with American literature’s most famous whale, its most obsessed captain, and its most obstinate office worker.
Call Me Moby by Lars Kenseth (Macmillan/Balzer + Bray) arrived this month, while March brings Bartleby by Matt Phelan (FSG) and YA science fiction novel The Celestial Seas by debut author T.A. Chan (Viking). Ahab and the Whale, a picture book by Manuel Marsol (NYRB Kids), blows in this May. None of the creators were initially aware of the others’ projects. “I saw Matt’s book at NCTE, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this isn’t Bartleby the Scrivener!’ ” Kenseth said with a laugh.
Phelan was equally bemused. “I absolutely did not know it was going to be a trend. It’s not like vampires or mermaids.”
Chan was also surprised—and noted that she had read in PW about an adult sci-fi novel based on Moby-Dick, which is also in this unintentional pod: Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart, a March publication from Tor.
But thinking in terms of “trend” may be, like Captain Ahab himself, misguided. Some stories seem to dwell in the depths of the collective unconscious, waiting to be reimagined. As Phelan puts it, “Melville is America’s Shakespeare. He was writing about the American soul and the darkness.” NICE
Family members pointed Kenseth to “Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick,” an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. (on view through Mar. 26), which showcases hundreds of illustrated editions and deems MobyDick “the most persistently pictured of all American novels.” Kenseth said he was struck by “how everyone loves the story, and everybody wants to draw this story, too. It’s such an ineffable thing; it’s a challenge in and of itself.”
I, Moby
Kenseth’s picture book, his debut as both author and illustrator, actually represents a return to familiar material. He’s drawn several Melville-themed cartoons for the New Yorker over the years, work that caught the attention of the Melville family, which catalogs and collects examples of how their ancestor’s work surfaces in popular culture. Most recently, he sold a cartoon to Melville’s great-great-granddaughter, in which restaurant patron Ahab asks a waiter for the only white crustacean in the lobster tank.
But Kenseth didn’t start out as a Melville fan. “When I was a kid, I was not a great reader,” he said. “Then the pandemic hit, and I thought I’m going to reread all the stuff I didn’t appreciate, both Bartleby and Moby-Dick. I had especially hated Bartleby—what’s this guy’s problem? Now that I’m over 40, I realize I know exactly what that guy is thinking. And Moby-Dick is just everything.”
That “everything” encompassed something specific and personal. His picture book comedy reimagines Moby as a leviathan who just wants to make friends, but whose enthusiastic attempts at connection end up terrifying humans. But instead of being miffed, Moby ends the story feeling socially and emotionally sanguine: “Not everybody will get you. But that’s okay.”
“I’m basically Moby,” Kenseth explained. “I moved around a lot as a kid, I was always trying to make friends, doing pratfalls. I could have saved myself a lot of anguish if I’d realized maybe that kid scowling at you across the way isn’t going to be your friend. Maybe you need to go find a lovely squid,” as Moby does in the end of the book.
The Kid Who Preferred Not To
Phelan’s journey to Bartleby began in a college literature class “a long, long time ago.” “It’s such a weird, dark, surprising story, it just sticks with you,” he said, particularly Bartleby’s response that becomes the story’s famous refrain: “I prefer not to.”
Years later, working in his sketchbook, Phelan created a kid character who says “no” a lot, and realized that having him say “I prefer not to” instead ”made it funny. But as the story took shape, it also became more emotionally profound. Bartleby, a polar bear cub in a red bowler hat and overalls, resists any attempts by peers and his teacher—Ms. Melville—to be included in classroom activities. “I had so many deep conversations with my editor [Janine O’Malley at FSG],” he said. “Bartleby’s not aloof—he wants to be part of the classroom but there are things he doesn’t want to do. [The children and teachers] want him to be a participant and welcome him but they don’t know what to do. It’s about trying to find this middle ground where they can exist and get along.”
Most young people either know a Bartleby or are one themselves, Phalen added. “I do a lot of school visits. I always see the kid who’s off to the side, and I personally know children like that.”
A Sympathetic Ahab
The lengthy, circuitous journey of Marsol’s Ahab and the Whale to U.S. shores may well rival that of the Pequod. Susan Barba, senior editor at New York Review Books, recounted in an email that the book was originally published in Spanish (as Ahab y la ballena blanca) in 2014 with Edelvives and again in 2024 by Fulgencio Pimentel. It caught Barba’s attention when it appeared in literary agent Alessandra Sternfeld’s catalog. “I was enchanted and quickly asked her for more information,” Barba said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be a great book for us.”
In a 2015 blog post on Picturebook Makers, Marsol wrote that his enigmatic, dreamlike book was inspired by both his love of Moby-Dick and his childhood vacations spent diving in the Mar Menor, a large saltwater lagoon on the Iberian peninsula, where he felt like “a small creature in a huge world.” The far-flung influences on his book’s look and feel included the striking compositions and palette of John Huston’s 1956 film version.
The story is narrated by Ahab himself and fundamentally reframes the character—his obsessiveness is tempered by self-awareness and wonder. Barba said she found this aspect particularly appealing. The portrayal of Ahab as “a sympathetic, driven goofball” makes the book, “a softer entry point into one of literature’s most intense characters.”
Whaling in Space
T.A. Chan knows her elevator pitch: The Celestial Seas, she told her Instagram followers in January, is a “queer Moby-Dick reimagining set in space.” The novel follows Ishara Ming, the traumatized sole survivor of the Essex, who’s determined to wreak revenge on the ship’s destroyer, a sentient spaceship MOBIS (Mech-Operated Bio-Integrated Spacecraft). The idea emerged from a confluence of inspirations: middle school aspirations to be a marine biologist, space operas like Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse, and a watercoloring session with friends where the idea of combining whales and space began as a goodhearted visual challenge.
She was familiar with the plot of Moby-Dick and how “white whale” had become cultural shorthand for obsession, but when she finally cracked open the book for the first time, “I didn’t realize it would be 400 pages on whale anatomy and cetology, with all the chase at the end,” she said with a laugh.
Still, she dove in—not just to the text, which became her touchstone, but also into the history of the whaling industry and the back story of the Essex—a real ship destroyed by a whale in 1820 that inspired Moby-Dick and would become the name of Ishara’s ill-fated vessel. She found it particularly resonant how whaling’s dangers offered opportunity and community to those who were otherwise marginalized—which became central to her imagining of her own novel’s crew.
Chan did decide to part ways with Melville in merging Ishmael and Ahab into one character—it was one less character to manage, she said. —Combining the immediacy of a first-person narrator with Ahab’s obsession enabled her to answer, “How far will you change yourself, and risk those you care for, to achieve something that will solve all your problems—but maybe not?”
It doesn’t appear that picture books or YA novels about Typee and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities are on the horizon, but that doesn’t mean Melville’s pull is fading. Phelan frames it as a generational duty to our shared cultural legacy. “In a world where there’s so much input,” he said, “I do think we have something of a responsibility to talk about what came before us—whether it’s Melville, the Beatles, or whatever.”
Kenseth has another take. “I remember learning a long time ago that whales were land-dwelling mammals that decided to go back to the water,” he said. “Honestly, at this point, given all that’s going on in so many different ways, I’d rather get into the ocean if I could.”
