The Porcupine Prince - by Tom Haviv (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A tender, beautifully illustrated children's book about the magic of friendship and the joy of connection.

The Porcupine Prince and his fellow porcupines share a problem: they are just too spiny to get close to each other. And when the Prince finally tries to tell his family how lonely he feels, they can't quite seem to hear him. To find the closeness he craves, the Prince must journey beyond the orderly and familiar Porcupine Empire and into the wet, wandering wilderness, where an unlikely friendship with some slippery salamanders helps him to discover his soft side--and to share that softness with his prickly family. The Porcupine Prince is a surreal fable about the magic of friendship and the joy of connection.

Review Quotes

Praise for the author's A Flag of No Nation

"Tom Haviv's relentlessly inventive first collection offers a fresh and moving reckoning with the charged nature of his family's Levantine-Jewish identity. Weaving a hybrid text out of a richly complex tale, Haviv makes his personal story come to stand for a much larger history, one that is, as he shows here--politically and poetically--re-membered best by being broken open."

--Peter Cole, author of Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

"Tom Haviv's A Flag of No Nation gives image and language to places and peoples that were not only lost and forgotten, but forced to be forgotten, othered, and shamed. The starting point of the writer's journey asking his grandmother 'Where are you from?' is answered throughout the text beautifully and delicately, giving again and again the opportunity to be in that place where the poem comes from, where the image is caught so wonderfully, where this conversation still continues."

--Tehila Hakimi, author of Company and We'll Work Tomorrow

"In this remarkable first collection, we are shown history is built from stories. We learn who tells, who's told, and how it's told makes all the difference. A Flag of No Nation refigures or recalls the poet as mythmaker, as archivist and historian, as the living pulse that links these things together through the human breath. In these formally inventive and deeply felt poems, Tom Haviv bears witness through inherited narratives, text, and emails. This is a living and essential book."

--sam sax, author of Bury It and Madness

About the Author

Tom Haviv is the author of the book of poetry A Flag of No Nation, published by Jewish Currents, and the children's book Woven. His multimedia work has been presented and performed internationally. Tom is the cofounder of Ayin Press and lives in Brooklyn.

Born in Berlin in 1994, Yanfush (aka Inbar Algazi) is an Israeli illustrator based in Toulouse. Her work focuses on picture books (Bella & Zouzou, zeltner, 2021), but also exhibitions (Médiathèque Saint-Cyprien, Toulouse Alfred Gallery, Tel Aviv), workshops, and various collaborations. She works in a variety of techniques, mixing and exploring everything from monotype to calligraphy, trying to catch poetic moments, tiny stories, and translate them onto paper.