What kid hasn't been ordered by their mother to invite someone to their birthday party, the dilemma that the book's protagonist faces. Of course Kate's protest of, "I can't invite Leo ... He shoots spitballs into my hair at recess" is brushed aside by her parents. But, worse comes when rumours fly through the school about Kate's pirate-themed party. Kate is worried that no one will want to come, and she is almost relieved when bossy Violet (who her mother also insisted that Kate invite) shows up. Her relief is short-lived, but you'll have to read the book to find out how the party turns out

"I see a nose on every face. I see noses every place!” Noses come in all shapes, colors, and sizes and are handy to have for sniffling, smelling, and . . . playing horns? This simple, sometimes silly story offers little ones a first ode to the nose and all that it does.

A dog follows his nose on an amazing journey, but can he find his way home?

Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

Something has happened on Blue Nose Island which has never happened before The sun hasn't come up and the moon has become stuck at the top of Blue Nose Volcano. Someone is going to have to do something--and so Ploo, the blue nose dog, begins an adventure to the Junglewood, where lives the Terrible Gnobbler. Will Ploo save the sun, or sink in the bottomless lagoon?