Nine poignant and empowering short stories from the author of The Breadwinner. The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice. Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children’s aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz. Mike survives seventy-two days of solitary as a young offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid, crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee smuggler to decide her fate. These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6 Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9 Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.

A collection of stories drawn from the author’s long and eventful life (born in 1920). Many are based on the author’s personal experience of life in Central Europe after the First World War. The writing has a sense of mystery and fantasy, but always laced with a wry sense of humour. This is a fascinating and wide ranging collection of stories, many having an almost cinematic quality from the author also being a painter. There are stories drawing on the author’s childhood and youth in Vienna, and visiting the family farm in Moravia in the aftermath of the First World War. Herta’s mother decided to leave home for Vienna as a teenager, and was taken on by a seamstress, who read to her girls while they were sewing, giving her an abiding love of literature that she passed on to her daughter. Herta experienced the rise of Nazism in Austria and Hitler’s Anchluss of the country, and several stories in this section reflect this period vividly. In the title story, The Singing Chair, a prosperous but stressed businessman is transported into a calming universe by a ‘magic’ chair. There follow other poignant and quirky tales of passion between the sexes. By contrast, others draw on Herta’s experience of postwar Germany – her British husband was part of the British Control Commission there. In Demeter, two British officers are rivals for the love of a destitute but beautiful refugee they rescue from a bombed-out street. Many of the stories add the ingredient of mystery and intrigue, but always permeated with the author’s characteristic humanity and wry sense of humour. The Magnolia Gown is set in the cut-throat world of the East London rag trade; Spash is a glorious short burst of fantasy as a woman visitor to Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace during a heatwave is lured into the baroque fountain to become one of Neptune’s mermaids.

Bliss and Other Stories is a 1920 collection of short stories by the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield.

Explores an individual's relationship to family, friends, and even pets.

Together Grandmother and Katie look through a family album and find all the little girls who have sat in Katie's black-and-gold chair.

"A novel about modern family life with all of its discord and harmony"--

A blind boy tells of his warm relationship with his grandmother and the gift she left for him after her death.