Geniuses at work.

A renaissance is under way in children's literature, and alongside the ephemera, an astonishing number of true and beautiful books for young people now can be found on library and bookstore shelves. The strongest confirmation that we are living in a moment hospitable to serious artistry came this spring when the long-silent giant, Tomi Ungerer, began to make books for children again. Forthwith follows my view of the best of the latest, and some reflections on the picture book prompted by Ungerer's exhilarating return.

The most lyrical and perfectly crafted picture book of 1998 is Snow (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $16) by Uri Shulevitz, the story of a boy who rightly believes that it will snow, despite the predictions of radio, television, and proximate adults that it will not. Every element of the book is right: the typography is beautiful, the language is economical and witty, the pacing impeccable, and the pictures set in marvelous colloquy with the words (on the page, "but as soon as one snowflake melts another takes its place," a subtle watercolor mark suggests a snowflake has melted straight into the paper). When above the words "floating floating through the air," which seemingly refer to snow, the statues of Mother Goose, her gander, and Humpty Dumpty (!) make their graceful gravity-defying descent from a bookstore facade to join the boy and his dog on the facing page, you know you are in the presence of the purely magical thing that only picture books can do.

Snow also testifies to the lost worlds that picture books remember: worlds of childhood that have gone under not only to time but more violent forces. Author Shulevitz, born in Warsaw in 1935, is a child of war. The gentle exchanges of courtesy and suspension of gravity in this Eastern European cityscape as it disappears under snow counterpoise the destruction witnessed by four-year-old Shulevitz during the Warsaw blitz, which he recalled for Lee Bennett Hopkins in Pauses: Autobiographical Reflection of 101 Creators of Children's Books (the loss of stairs in his apartment building, and his ensuing terror, perhaps the deep source of Humpty Dumpty's magical descent).

The great makers bring everything to the picture book (no repression, just tact) and they also use all the physical elements of the book without apology. They know that the book's primacy as conservator of the past depends upon the fact that its pages can turn either way, forward to unfold the visual and verbal narrative, and backward to be reviewed and lingered over. (The movement of a book is different from that of television, video, and computer, and the best children's books know it!) G. Brian Karas's lovely, The Windy Day (Simon and Schuster, $16), uses to great effect the left and right pages as indicators of before and after. A wind blows into a tidy town from the left, inspiring a tidy boy's vision when he turns to face it. Earlier, daydreaming at school, the boy had been gazing in the other direction, right toward a blank window and wall. The wind refreshes and animates the boy's sense of the past, all the bits and pieces he had learned at school swept up into a thrilling drama that moves rightward into a now richly promising future. The Windy Day is a delicate and rare portrait of the inner life of a schoolchild.

Far from being irrelevant to modern children, the old stories - myths, folk and fairy tales, Bible stories - seem almost to have written us into being. In her adult collection of fairy tales, The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon, $15,242 pp.), British novelist Angela Carter says that folk tales, once the universal entertainment of the poor, are "the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world." In myths and in the Bible our children discover our most important narrative professions of cosmology, theology, ontology. When I select retellings of these stories, I look for books that are tactful but don't excerpt a vital unpleasantness.

In presenting the classical myths, no one has yet surpassed Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's 1962 Book of Greek Myths (Doubleday, $24.95, 192 pp.) for visual information, entertaining and graceful storytelling, or for organization. The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales (DK Publishing, $19.95, 160 pp.), retold by Neil Philip and illustrated by Nilesh Mistry, is a fine new international collection of folk and fairy tales. The nine-year-old I read it with ignored the trademark DK information sidebars in favor of the fifty-two pithily told stories themselves.

I prefer the leisurely pacing of single-story books and highly recommend the Armenian folk tale, The Golden Bracelet (Holiday House, $16.95), retold by David Kherdian and illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian, which embodies the satisfying reversals of folk tales and more rarely, a perfect balance of power between men and women. When a peasant maiden, Anahid, demands that her carefree suitor, Prince Haig, learn a craft before she will consider him, he labors to acquire the skill of weaving, which wins not only her love but later, in a twist on the Philomela myth, his freedom. Kherdian's sinewy retelling is perfectly balanced by veteran artist Hogrogian's incarnation of emotion in the simplest of gestures.

The best Bible retellings, whether they are conceived from a religiously interested position or not, are those which give the powerful strangeness of biblical narrative its due. Lisbeth Zwerger's brilliantly illustrated Noah's Ark (adapted by Heinz Janisch, North-South Books, $16.95) is the first picture-book Noah to give as much attention to the destruction of the whole world as to the animals and the rainbow. For the very young, I recommend First Bible Stories (Barron's, $14.95 cloth, 96 pp.), Margaret Mayo's vivid retellings of nine Old Testament tales, illustrated by Nicola Smee. This read-aloud collection is the fifth Mayo storybook to have crossed the ocean. Our favorites are Magical Tales from Many Lands (Dutton, $19.95,126 pp.) and When the World Was Young: Creation and Pourquoi Tales (Simon and Schuster, $19.95, 75 pp.). Mayo is very good at not only presenting difficult matters like the infanticide, slavery, and race hatred found in Exodus, but also at bringing forward the humor which we so often forget animates stories like Jonah. Artist Nicola Smee, who lets herself go on that one (don't miss the sidelong glance of the child attendant waiting patiently as his king repents atop a heap of ashes), serves Mayo well throughout.

Thanks to Russian artist Mikhail Fiodorov's grave and graceful illustrations, A Family Treasury of Bible Stories: One for Each Week of the Year (Harry N. Abrams, $19.95) is the most glorious illustrated Bible in years. Roberto Brunelli's retellings (translated from Italian by Laurence Jenkins) from the Douai version are elegant and spare, their authority visually reinforced by triple-column printing. Fiodorov's extraordinarily well-composed and fluid illustrations, inspired by both quattrocento painting and Russian iconography, spread across the full pages in diptych and triptych arrangement. Our resident four-year-old cannot get enough of this beautifully designed book. Prompted by its weekly arrangement, I wonder whether a publisher might persuade Fiodorov to make a big illustrated Sunday Missal for children, the most urgently needed of catechetical books.

Eric Kimmel's Be Not Far from Me, illustrated by David Diaz (Simon and Schuster, $25, 256 pp.), is a fabulous Midrash-enhanced collection of stories from the Hebrew Bible. Midrash is a Hebrew term which refers to specific, often narrative, exegetical practices that resulted in a variety of noncanonical retellings and rabbinic commentaries. As Professor James Kugel explains in The Bible As It Was (Harvard University Press), this mode of interpretation, also influential in the composition of the Talmud in the fifth and sixth centuries, shares four assumptions about the Bible: that it is cryptic, relevant, perfect and harmonious, and divinely inspired. In Midrashic literature, rabbis told stories that brought forward a living message from the Bible by filling in its narrative gaps and reconciling its contradictions. (This style of interpretation is a perfect match for the inquisitive young, who also want to know why God chose Abraham, how the latter felt about being asked to sacrifice his son, whether Isaac recovered, and what about Sarah). Drawing on Midrash and the Bible, Kimmel tells the story of twenty heroes and heroines beginning with Abraham and ending with the prophet Daniel. Be Not Far from Me is as thoughtfully conceived as the d'Aulaires Greek Myths, with maps, chronology, excellent storytelling, and, in keeping with Jewish prohibitions against images, silhouette portraits of the heroes, made by the talented David Diaz.

If 1998 is remembered as an annus mirabilis in children's literature, it will be because Tomi Ungerer has broken more than two decades of picture-book silence with Flix (TomiCo with Roberts Rinehart, $16.95) and a new imprint (TomiCo) which promises to publish his amazing oeuvre (this year, the 1962 The Three Robbers, 1966 Moon Man, and 1973 No Kiss for Mother). His return has been met with jubilation (the Danish Hans Christian Andersen Medal among other awards) and occasions here some reflections on the history and nature of the picture book.

Before his long silence, Ungerer, now sixty-seven years old, made twenty-two picture books (and served as illustrator for many more), all but a handful with Ursula Nordstrom, legendary director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls, whose recently published letters, Dear Genius (ed. Leonard Marcus, HarperCollins, $22.95, 406 pp.), are must reading for all interested in the genre's golden age. From 1940 to 1973, Nordstrom gathered and nurtured superlative writers and artists committed to making first-rate picture books for children, among them Ungerer, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, Arnold Lobel, Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, Russell Hoban, Garth Williams, and Marc Simont.

Sendak was Nordstrom's "genius" because he was (and continues to be) a brilliant artist and experimenter, dedicated to crafting picture books that "create an inner life that draws breath from the artist's deepest perception," and a superbly knowledgeable guide to the history and workings of the form (his collected prose essays, Caldecott & Company [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95,216 pp.] are indispensable). Margaret Wise Brown, steeped in Gertrude Stein, brought the modernist aesthetic to children, while Ruth Krauss, a trained anthropologist, obeyed Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new" by recording and presenting children's language, their definitions and narratives, without condescension. Arnold Lobel, in the linguistic confines of Nordstrom's "I Can Read Books," created Frog and Toad, the most important set of stories about friendship since Kenneth Grahame's sublime The Wind in the Willows. Comic-strip veteran Crockett Johnson confirmed the likeness between picture books and the funnies, an art form which began shortly after Randolph Caldecott's contrapuntal illustrations of Mother Goose (1878) inaugurated the picture book genre, and which also lives by the interaction of text and pictures, and the movement both within and between pages, or frames. (Ludwig Bemelmans, Jean de Brunhoff, William Steig, and Dr. Seuss were also cartoonists.) Ungerer brought philosophy to the genre, an edgy combination of macabre humor and detached ontological musing that can be credited to his harrowing coming of age on the front lines of wartime Alsace.

This was a stellar group, morally and aesthetically ambitious, supported by a publisher willing to explain to dissatisfied readers why they should trust a visionary artist who discomfits them. (Nordstrom's letters defending the sexism in Ungerer's No Kiss for Mother and nudity in Sendak's In the Night Kitchen should be required reading for editors working in today's more consolidated and anxious-to-please industry, as Nordstrom's authoritative sense of the difference between liberty and license, evident in her exchanges with writers and illustrators, might fortify and encourage them.) Because they were serious artists, these picture-book makers were natural allies with children no matter how unsettling their work, because they too were explorers and interpreters. (Think how many great picture books, from Edward Ardizzone's Brave Tim books to Margaret Wise Brown's Little Fur Family, Ezra Jack Keats's, The Snowy Day, Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius are about leaving the known, mastering the unfamiliar, discovering limits, returning home gratefully and changed, a plot that charts not only children's development but the creative process itself.)

Nordstrom's heady era inaugurated an explosion of picture books. Thanks to her we can now buy or borrow heaps of wonderful books - unless we can't find them in the thicket of ephemeral books dolled up by eye-popping (but static!) pictures made possible by new printing technologies. Into this surfeited scene, Ungerer's Flix boldly reasserts the momentousness of the well-crafted picture book, telling the story of a dog born to cat parents, who lives with increasing comfort in both cultures, campaigns for mutual respect between dogs and cats, and who, after marrying a French poodle (an exchange student at Flix's university), becomes the delighted father of a kitten. Flix is a very funny book, with unbelievably droll pictures, low jokes, and visual puns like the statue of Saint Bernard - yes, the breed - in Dog City Cathedral. Flix's true subject? Quotidian cruelty and decency, human solitude, the transforming power of love, as understood by an artist courageous and loving enough to describe the human condition to little ones. It is good to have this sophisticated believer in the moral intelligence of children back among us.

There are many more great new books, but let me just mention in closing three for older readers. Peg Kehret's Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio (Albert Whitman, $14.95,179 pp.) is a plain-style account of twelve-year-old Kehret's paralyzing affliction with polio in 1949, and her painful recovery of movement and ability to walk. There are a million life lessons in the book (both for parents and children) and not one maudlin line. Teen-agers and adults, gird yourself for the forthcoming conclusion to Philip Pullman's fantastical His Dark Materials trilogy, by reading or rereading The Golden Compass (Knopf, $20,399 pp.) and The Subtle Knife (Knopf, $20,326 pp.). It looks like Lyra Belacqua and her companion Will Parry, questing and hunted travelers between worlds and times, are going to replay the Fall of Man. These amazing novels almost persuade me that, in the modern world, blasphemy may be the most potent mode of asserting and wrestling with belief in God.

Daria Donnelly will be writing regularly on children's books for Commonweal.