A bear dresses up in dilapidated clothing only to be laughed at and two birds quarrel over the ownership of a top hat in these two stories told in pictures.

'To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.' From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales, in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the glittering gauze of fiction. 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack - to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer's mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story; in 'The Wishing Table' the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.

Publishers Weekly Best Books in Fiction 2018 The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.

A collection of favourite tales gathered from the many different islands of the Caribbean, one of the world's richest sources of traditional storytelling. From the very first Kingfisher to Anansi the Spider Man, these lively retellings full of humour and pathos, are beautifully retold by Trish Cooke. The book includes endnotes with a glossary, additional information as well as ideas for activities that children can do to explore the stories further.

Provides humorous parodies of the stories of Hamlet, Lohengrin, Salome, Perseus, and Pan, and includes information about the author's life and times

Two parrots brought up in different surroundings…… What are they like? How do they differ? Does the company they keep affect them? Read on to find out!

In their moral tales, writers such as Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth embraced explicitly didactic aims, seeking to instill normative moral behavior in their readers while entertaining them with vivid, emotional storytelling. In More’s “Tawney Rachel,” for example, a servant girl suffers severe consequences for succumbing to superstition; in Opie’s “The Black Velvet Pelisse,” a young woman is rewarded for a charitable act with a desirable marriage; and in Edgeworth’s “The Dun,” a wealthy man’s selfishness destroys a poor family before he finally sees the error of his ways. This edition offers a selection of five short fictions by More, Opie, and Edgeworth—the best-known writers of the moral tale—prefaced by a critical introduction to the genre and its place in the complex and fascinating debates surrounding the writing and reading of fiction in the Romantic period. The volume concludes with a variety of background materials that help situate the moral tale in its late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary contexts, including moral tales for children, theories of education, and contemporary reviews.