The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau. Highly thought-provoking and full of self-contradiction.

Jansson's writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth. — Ali Smith

This new translation of Pinocchio will forever banish the saucer-eyed Disney character from your mind (not to mention the advice-spouting Talking Cricket, whom Pinocchio squashes with a mallet in chapter 4). At once in the tradition of great fairy tales and a precursor to magic realism, the original Pinocchio is a joy for all ages.

This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

It reads like Beethoven’s Ninth...Coated with sea salt, its crannies spilling wildflowers, Edwards's book still roars like some huge shell held, cutting, against your ear. — The Atlantic

A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood - and pirates!

At long last I pulled down from its place on the shelves Sylvia Townsend Warner's plump little novel impishly titled Mr. Fortune's Maggot and was once again amazed by what a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer this English woman was. — Eudora Welty

Brilliant glimpses of Americana delivered with a perfectionist's eye for a well-rounded story. Powers' stories about priests of all persuasions achieve a clarity beyond ink and paper.

To understand Thoreau, one must read his journals, which show the man and all of his facets. And what better time to try than at the issuing of an edition that draws on the entirety of his 14 volume journal?