A selection of tales from Rootabaga Country peopled with such characters as the Potato Face Blind Man, the Blue Wind Boy, and many others.

Rootabaga Stories is a children's book of interrelated short stories by Carl Sandburg. The whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories, which often use nonsense language, were originally created for his own daughters. Sandburg had three daughters, Margaret, Janet and Helga, whom he nicknamed "Spink", "Skabootch" and "Swipes", and those nicknames occur in some of his Rootabaga stories. The "Rootabaga" stories were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhood. A large number of the stories are told by the Potato Face Blind Man, an old minstrel of the Village of Liver-and-Onions who hangs out in front of the local post office. His impossibly acquired first-hand knowledge of the stories adds to the book's narrative feel and fantastical nature._x000D_ Excerpt:_x000D_ "Gimme the Ax lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was. 'The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out, said Gimme the Ax. The doorknobs open the doors. The windows are always either open or shut. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was..."_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_

A selection of tales from Rootabaga Country peopled with such characters as the Huckabuck Family, Big Buff Banty Hen, Dippy the Wisp, and many others.

Fiction. In THE WORDS, Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character and plot. There's a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her deconstructions -- and always a devotion to language, its elasticity and limits. I admire Harryman's rare mind, its gleeful feminism, broad intelligence and anarchic inventiveness! -- Lynne Tillman. At last, children's literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla Harryman's WORDS is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually unnaming names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to hybridizing texts. Bold and subversive! -- Marjorie Welish.

Originally published: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922.

Originally published: San Diego: Harcourt Brace, c1922.

Presents Sandburg's fanciful, humorous tales peopled with such characters as the Potato Face Blind Man, the Blue Wind Boy, and many others.