Rushdie’s Expanding Sea of Stories and Other Literary Gossip Gleaned from the New York Public Library’s Spring Luncheon

Salman Rushdie is putting the finishing touches this week on his second children’s novel. “What kind of writer are you if you can’t write a book for your own child?” he said yesterday during a panel on children’s literature at the New York Public Library’s Spring Luncheon. Nineteen years ago he published “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” for his son Zafar, who was 11 years old at the time. The next one is for 11-year-old son Milan, “who’s been demanding his own book,” Mr. Rushdie said.

Father might have some wicked sibling rivalry on his hands when “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” which has already made it to the stage in London and New York (at New York City Opera with music by Charles Wuorinen), winds up on the big screen after years of false starts. "We have the producer from ‘Shrek,’ so it has a reasonable chance of happening," Mr. Rushdie said. Signed on to write and direct is Alan Parker (whose films range from “Fame” to “Evita” to Angela’s Ashes”).

Mr. Rushdie listened closely when panelist Chris Van Allsburg spoke about the screen adaptations of his books “Jumanji” and “Polar Express.” Mr. Van Allsburg wrote a script for “Jumanji” but “it got rewritten 5 or 6 times.” Robin Williams starred. “I’d imagined it with more surrealism; it turned out more of an action film,” said Mr. Van Allsburg. On “Polar Express,” he came up with a lot of new ideas, but the producers said they just wanted to make the book. “You couldn’t have asked for a more faithful adaptation,” Mr. Van Allsburg said of the Tom Hanks film, politely not mentioning that the film, critically panned, could have used his help.

So far Mr. Rushdie is getting along with his screenwriter Mr. Parker. “We were at dinner recently and I asked him, how long will it take you to write this? And he said three to four months," Mr. Rushdie recounted. What happens after that? "[Parker] told me, ‘You read it, and if you don’t like it then I write it again.'”

Panelist Mary Ann Hoberman — the nation’s children’s poet laureate — didn’t have a Hollywood story to share; instead she broke into song, performing one of her own poems about snow. Mr. Van Allsburg joined in. The moderator, New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, gave children's literature its due, describing it as "the place where the necessary equilibrium between anarchy and order is established again and again."

The New York Public Library Spring Luncheon raised more than $450,000. The annual fund-raising event features a panel of distinguished writers addressing a theme. The theme of children’s literature celebrated the recent opening of the Children’s Center at the flagship branch and the librarian Anne Carroll Moore, who at the turn of the 20th century invented the concept of a children’s library not only at the New York Public Library but throughout America. Trustees Joan Hardy Clark and Calvin Trillin selected the theme, and trustee Katharine Rayner donated beautiful floral centerpieces that reflected the theme by incorporating antique toys from the collection of Susan Miller Smith.