Product Description

An illustrated collection of poems and brief tales on a variety of subjects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1891367 in Books
• Published on: 1990-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 43 pages

Customer Reviews

The kind of rare book which expands a child's imagination
What a joy it is to find this book again, first printed in 1958. Books like this truly aren't written anymore, probably because it takes a special writer with the imagination and creative vision to believe that children CAN understand these little stories - and to be enriched by them. Not all of these pieces are immediately understandable, at least on a purely logical level, but they ARE intuitively and emotionally understandable, piecees like: "There was a kitten. And there was a lion. And the lion chased the kitten and the kitten ran. She ran into the woods and dug a hole for the lion to fall in. ...The Indians came and shot arrows in him. And they killed him. Then they shot arrows in all the lions on the world. They killed all the lions in the world...there n3ever were more lions Evermore. But there are still tigers. " Ah, the joy of this book!

Strange and Beautiful
Ruth Krauss was the best picture book writer of her generation, narrowly edging out Margaret Wise Brown and her husband, Crockett Johnson. But this early work of hers--one of the first books of Maurice Sendak's career as well--is on an entirely different level yet. These brief, even sudden, "tales from Children" that Krauss selected and edited are startling in the way they combine archaic and conversational language, storybook cliche and fresh imagination, image and substance. Some of them are simply joyful: "A Girl at a Party" gets the biggest laugh, using a twist ending O. Henry would have been proud of. Some are so strange and wonderful you might feel like you're reading Gilgamesh: "The White Boat," while only a page long, seems mythic in conception. I'm writing this from the perspective of an adult, but any child with imagination would have no trouble loving these stories. My daughter (age 6) listened, rapt, and wanted to write her own stories after. Thank you, Linnet Books, for reprinting this work!