A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams.

'I could get in,' Marianne thought, 'if there was a person inside the house. There has got to be a person. I can't get in unless there is somebody there.' A powerful and haunting classic about a girl haunted by her own dreams. Ill and bored with having to stay in bed, Marianne picks up a pencil and starts doodling - a house, a garden, a boy at the window. That night she has an extraordinary dream. She is transported into her own picture, and as she explores further she soon realises she is not alone. The boy at the window is called Mark, and his every movement is guarded by the menacing stone watchers that surround the solitary house. Together, in their dreams, Marianne and Mark must save themselves . . . The perfect gift for children aged 8+, this well-loved classic will delight a new generation of readers of the Faber Children's Classics list.

In the darkest hour of a freezing Midwinter, a night-walking witch adopts a newborn baby and carries her off in her house on chicken legs. She names her Chingis and teaches her the Three Magics. She grows into such a powerful witch that she rouses the jealousy of Kuzma, the bear-shaman. The Czar of this cold realm fears his newborn son, Safa, will out do him, and so imprisons the baby at the top of a tall tower, to live and die there without ever glimpsing the real world. Loneliness and confinement drive him to rage and despair until Chingis hears the crying of his trapped spirit and frees him. But now their enemies unite against them, with steel and deadly magic. Chingis and Safa's fight for freedom will take them even through the Ghost World into the Land of the Dead. A timeless and atmospheric tale of fierce magic.

Channeling the creative potential of humanity to transition towards joyous and just futures in times of life-threatening climate change, this book uses metaphors of magic and shapeshifting to imagine liveable futures achievable through other-than-rational means. Focusing on a wide range of 20th and 21st-century novels from a diverse range of writers such as Madeline Miller, Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula LeGuin, N.K. Jemisin, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, it suggests that readers take seriously the pedagogical potential of magic in literature for the classroom and beyond while providing them with contextualized, collective methods of climate action.

“As the first part of the title indicates, my interest in looking at intertextuality and transformation still maintains a prominent place throughout this book as well. If we believe that ‘no text is an island,’ then we will understand that the relationships between and within texts across the years become a fascinating place for academic inquiry. I included the word ‘boundaries’ into the title because we never get tired of voicing our opinions about texts which traverse relegated boundaries, such as genre or medium. Not only am I interested in discussing what these changes across boundaries mean socially, historically, and culturally, but also what they mean geographically, which accounts for the second part of my title. “I am very excited that this book will be placing even more emphasis on children’s literature in an international scene than my first book did, in the sense that I have added more scholars on an international level. I hesitate to list the nationalities of all of the contributors here because quite a few have themselves crossed international boundaries in different ways, by either studying abroad or finding permanent residency in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the writers have lived extensively in or identify as being from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United States of America, and Wales.” —Introduction

This book reconsiders audiovisual culture through a focus on human perception, with recourse to ideas derived from recent neuroscience. It proceeds from the assumption that rather than simply working on a straightforward cognitive level audiovisual culture also functions more fundamentally on a physiological level, directly exploiting precise aspects of human perception. Vision and hearing are unified in a merged signal in the brain through being processed in the same areas. This is illustrated by the startling ‘McGurk Effect’, whereby the perception of spoken sound is changed by its accompanying image, and counterpart effects which demonstrate that what we see is affected by different sounds accompanying sounds. This blending of sound and images into a whole has become a universal aspect of culture, not only evident in films and television but also in video games and short Internet clips. Indeed, this aesthetic formation has become the dominant of this period. The McGurk Universe attends to how audiovisual culture engages with and mediates between physiological and psychological levels.