Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin—this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ballads, parables, anecdotes, and legends along with some of the finest work of Chekhov, Babel, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Kafka, Peter Taylor, and Katherine Anne Porter. This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings. Contents RANDALL JARRELL: Introduction FRANZ KAFKA: A Country Doctor ANTON CHEKHOV: Gusev RAINER MARIA RILKE: The Wrecked Houses; The Big Thing ROBERT FROST: The Witch of Coös GIOVANNI VERGA: La Lupa NIKOLAI GOGOL: The Nose ELIZABETH BOWEN: Her Table Spread LUDWIG TIECK: Fair Eckbert BERTOLT BRECHT: Concerning the Infanticide, Marie Farrar LEO TOLSTOY: The Three Hermits PETER TAYLOR: What You Hear from 'Em? HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Fir Tree KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: He ANONYMOUS: The Red King and the Witch ANTON CHEKHOV: Rothschild's Fiddle THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Cat and Mouse in Partnership E. M. FORSTER: The Story of the Siren THE BOOK OF JONAH FRANZ KAFKA: The Bucket-Rider SAINT-SIMON: The Death of Monseigneur ISAAC BABEL: Awakening CHUANG T'ZU: Five Anecdotes HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL: A Tale of the Cavalry WILLIAM BLAKE: The Mental Traveller D. H. LAWRENCE: Samson and Delilah LEO TOLSTOY: The Porcelain Doll IVAN TURGENEV: Byezhin Prairie WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: The Ruined Cottage FRANK O'CONNOR: Peasants ISAK DINESEN: Sorrow-Acre

There was once a little brown bat who couldn't sleep days-he kept waking up and looking at the world. Before long he began to see things differently from the other bats, who from dawn to sunset never opened their eyes. The Bat-Poet is the story of how he tried to make the other bats see the world his way. Here in The Bat-Poet are the bat's own poems and the bat's own world: the owl who almost eats him; the mockingbird whose irritable genius almost overpowers him; the chipmunk who loves his poems, and the bats who can't make beads or tails of them; the cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, and sparrows who fly in and out of Randall Jarrell's funny, lovable, truthful fable. Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT) Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT)

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Once upon a time there was a mothe . . . who loved her daughter so much, she wanted to make her a wonderful surprise. So she mixed up some dough and cut out a beautiful gingerbread rabbit. But she got the surprise when the rabbit jumped up, ran out the door, and escaped into the forest! Follow the gingerbread rabbit and the mother as they run through the woods finding adventure, new friends, and the best surprises of all.

19 original poems and 12 translations, mostly of Rilke.