While Canadian political nerds were glued to live feeds from Parliament Hill on Friday, a different kind of nerd was revelling in other, quieter breaking news: This fall, Maurice Sendak will unveil the first book he’d both written and illustrated in nearly 30 years.

Mr. Sendak is best known for 1963′s Where the Wild Things Are, which still evokes a misty-eyed sentimentalism in many adults who loved it (including Spike Jonze http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386117/, who made it into a film to mixed reviews.)

The sage’s new offering is called Bumble-Ardy and tells the tale of a pig who has his first birthday party when he turns 9.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Sendak, 82, first began to develop the character in 1971 in an animated short produced for Sesame Street, by Jim Henson.

Speaking by phone from his home in Connecticut, he told the paper he had been unable to forget Bumble-Ardy. “He was funny. He was robust. He was sly. He was a sneak. He was all the things I like,” Mr. Sendak said.

One major change: The character was originally a boy whose mother goes to work on his birthday, unaware that he has invited nine pigs over in her absence. In the new version, Mr. Sendak turned the boy into a pig as well, because “boys tend, generally speaking, to be pigs.”

Another difference is that in the original, the characters drink wine, and now they drink “brine.”

But all has not been scrubbed clean. It sounds like there’s a good dose of the melancholy and darkness that so captivated many of us in Wild Things. In the book’s prologue, the parents get eaten and the pig is raised by his aunt.

Maurice Sendak fans, will you pick up a copy of Bumble-Ardy? Any other books that make your heart swell with nostalgia and wish for a follow-up?