From the pen of Mick Jackson, author of The Underground Man and Five Boys, come these ten acclaimed tales. Featuring undertakers, dark forests, resurrected butterflies and a singularly mean-spirited horse, the stories are nevertheless rooted in the realistic and all too recognisable world of retirement, loneliness, and childhood boredom. By turns funny, scary and heartbreaking, they are always illuminating, and further evidence of one of the most original and brilliant imaginations in contemporary fiction.

Humor, fantasy, love, adventure, danger, courage, death . . . The stories in this book were picked by young adults Here is a brilliant anthology. The editor presented students with the most popular stories published in the last several years. Then he said: Choose the best, choose the ones that grip you in a vise of excitement and won’t let you go, the ones that leave you with a sense of mystery and strangeness, the ones that rock you with laughter, the ones that really mean something to you as a young adult. The result is the brightest, freshest, most original collection of proven popular stories published in decades.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

Told with inviting rhythms and reassuring endings that embody simple truths, this collection of folk tales from Malaysia, Russia, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, China, Africa, and India promote cooperation and self-awareness and are complemented by serene pen-and-watercolor illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This classic collection of short stories includes some of Clarke's finest work: vivid glimpses into the future, a year, a decade, a century, a millennium from now.

The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.

Published to tie in with Mick Jackson's appointment as the first writer-in-residence at the Science Museum, Junior Science comprises three stories - 'Zero Gravity', 'The Answering Machine', and 'Back to School'. Commissioned by BBC Radio 4, they were originally broadcast in November 2011. Full of wonder, pathos and mystery, the stories are marked by Jackson's unique sensibility, as they explore the way children start to become aware of the world around them.