Six animal-theme stories of children encountering animals - what happens is chaos, love and even teamwork. A good read for primary-school children. "Sure enough the kitchen floor was tilted slightly. Susheila gasped and ran in to grab Cloud's cage and her schoolbag and scuttled after the others up towards the road. Looking back she could see that the trees and part of the road has slid down towards the river which was now pushing the loose earth and stones out of its way. their house has slipped down towards the rushing river. She clutched her mother's arm. - Excerpt from Pigeon Post, the first of six stories in this new book by Gwen Smith.

For anyone who loves sailing and adventure, Arthur Ransome's classic Swallows and Amazons series stands alone. Originally published in the UK over a half century ago, these books are still eagerly read by children, despite their length and their decidedly British protagonists. We attribute their success to two facts: first, Ransome is a great storyteller and, second, he clearly writes from first-hand experience. Independence and initiative are qualities any child can understand and every volume in this collection celebrates these virtues. The crew's on holiday for their sixth adventure, and they turn their energies to mining for gold, aided by pigeon messengers Homer, Sophocles, and Sappho. The adventurers comb the nearby hills for a fabled lost claim, while being shadowed by a mysterious figure they dub "squashy hat." Undeterred by drought, sudden brushfires, and the continuing presence of Squashy Hat, the young prospectors persevere in their quest -- with surprising results. Full of the dangers and dark adventures of old mines and forgotten claims, Pigeon Post has an irresistible appeal to the persistent explorer in every child.

When "Hard Times" appeared as a serial in Household Words in 1854, Dickens was about midway in his literary career. In the same year this novel appeared in an octavo volume with a dedication to Thomas Carlyle. Its purpose, according to Dickens himself, was to satirize "those who see figures and averages and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time — the men who through long years to come will do more to damage the really useful facts of Political Economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life." The satire, however, like much that Dickens attempted in the same vein, was not very bitter. The characters in "Hard Times" are not numerous; and the plot itself is less intricate than others by the same author. The chief figures are Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, "a man of realities," with his unbounded faith in statistics; Louisa, his eldest daughter; and Josiah Bounderby, as practical as Mr. Gradgrind, but less kind-hearted. Louisa, though many years younger than Mr. Bounderby, is persuaded by her father to marry him. She is also influenced in making this marriage by her desire to smooth the path of her brother Tom, a clerk in Mr. Bounderby's office. Though not happy, she resists the blandishments of James Harthouse, a professed friend of her husband's. To escape him she has to go home to her father; and this leads to a permanent estrangement between husband and wife. In the mean time Tom Gradgrind has stolen money from Bounderby, and to avoid punishment runs away from England ...

There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape—distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.

Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon's short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung's stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world in which the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst of situations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the "weirdest" and most unsettling parts of life . . .

"A man, a writer, lives alone in a rather squalid Paris apartment. He is trying to write a novel, but he has nothing to say. He tries multiple beginnings, interspersed with one digression (but from what?) after another. In the hope of finding subject matter for his would-be realistic story, he then sends letters to three friends - Edmond, Edgar, and Edourd - with a list of questions about their lives, some rather personal inquiries, some bordering on the obscene. The responses are not very helpful, and even seem suspiciously untrue. Out of this melange of stops and starts, false information, questionable memories, pieces of this and that, an insanely comic novel starts to emerge." "Dumitru Tsepeneag takes us into a game of memory and storytelling, where the tenderness of the past clashes with the comedy of the present, and where fictional characters and actual friends mingle in the play of the imagination."--BOOK JACKET.