A king builds a glass mountain which any man who wants to marry his daughter must climb--but when Princess Raina tries to help one special suitor succeed, she falls through a deep crack and is trapped in an underground world. Full color.

Presents retellings of traditional Polish tales including How the princess learned to laugh, Pan Twardowski, Where devils are helpless, and The sorcerer's apprentice.

Jan Pienkowski brings eight of the best-loved Polish folk tales to life with vibrant and witty paper cut illustrations. Jan Pienkowski illustrates eight popular Polish folk tales using the traditional paper cut technique he learned as a child. Featuring classic stories such as "Pan Twardowski", "The Glass Mountain", "The Wawel Dragon" and "The Fern Flower". Jan Pienkowski breathes new life into the magical tales of his homeland. It is a brand-new title from one of the giants of children's illustration. The bold, witty illustrations will appeal to children. It is the perfect way to introduce children to classic Polish folk tales. It is a beautiful jacketed hardback gift book that families will enjoy again and again.

In the summer of 1823, a grizzly bear mauled Hugh Glass. The animal ripped the trapper up, carving huge hunks from his body. Glass's fellows rushed to his aid and slew the bear, but Glass's injuries mocked their first aid. The expedition leader arranged for his funeral: two men would stay behind to bury the corpse when it finally stopped gurgling; the rest would move on. Alone in Indian country, the caretakers quickly lost their nerve. They fled, taking Glass's gun, knife, and ammunition with them. But Glass wouldn't die. He began crawling toward Fort Kiowa, hundreds of miles to the east, and as his speed picked up, so did his ire. The bastards who took his gear and left him to rot were going to pay. Here Lies Hugh Glass springs from this legend. The acclaimed historian Jon T. Coleman delves into the accounts left by Glass's contemporaries and the mythologizers who used his story to advance their literary and filmmaking careers. A spectacle of grit in the face of overwhelming odds, Glass sold copy and tickets. But he did much more. Through him, the grievances and frustrations of hired hunters in the early American West and the natural world they traversed and explored bled into the narrative of the nation. A marginal player who nonetheless sheds light on the terrifying drama of life on the frontier, Glass endures as a consummate survivor and a complex example of American manhood. Here Lies Hugh Glass, a vivid, often humorous portrait of a young nation and its growing pains, is a Western history like no other.

A glass mountain sits in the middle of a city and at the top sits a 'beautiful, enchanted symbol'. Seeking to disenchant it, the narrator must climb the mountain. Confronted by the jeers of acquaintances, the bodies of previous climbers and the claws of a guarding eagle he, slowly, begins to ascend. In true postmodernist form, subject and purpose collide as Donald Barthelme uses one-hundred fragmented statements to destabilise a symbol of his own - literature's conventional forms and practices. With a quest, a princess and an array of knights, Barthelme subverts that most traditional of genres, the fairy-tale; irony, absurdity, and playful self-reflexivity are the champions of this short story.

A fictionalized biography of the legendary hero of the Old West, who as a fur trapper in 1823, survived an attack by a grizzly bear, and crawled 200 miles to the nearest fort to seek revenge on the two men who left him for dead.

Crackling Mountain and Other Stories features eleven outstanding works by Osama Dazai, widely regarded as one of the 20th century Japan's most gifted writers. Dazai experimented with a wide variety of short story styles and brought to each a sophisticated sense of humor, a broad empathy for the human condition, and a tremendous literary talent. The eleven stories in this collection of Japanese literature present the most fully rounded portrait available of a tragic, multifaceted genius of modern Japanese letters.