In a cold, gloomy castle where all the clocks have stopped, a wicked Duke amuses himself by finding new and fiendish ways of rejecting the suitors for his niece, the good and beautiful Princess Saralinda.

"How to introduce kids to Shakespeare--not just to the stories behind the plays but to the richness of his language and the depth of his characters. That's the challenge that Leon Garfield, a wonderful children's book writer, undertook to meet in his monumental and delightful Shakespeare Stories. Here are twenty-one of the Bard's plays, presented in what is not a series of dry retellings, but rather a refashioning of the dramas as stories, in a way...

Bunyip Bluegum, an adventurous Australian koala bear, meets up with a sailor, a penguin, and their magic pudding, which is in constant danger of being stolen.

When a family buys a new house, each member has a different idea of what color to paint it.

When a robber steals his grandmother's musical coffee mill, Kasperl and his best friend Seppel try to catch the robber, who enlists the help of his wicked magician friend, Petrosilius Zackleman, a gluttonous villain with a weakness for fried potatoes.

"It's 5pm on New Year's Eve in the Villa Nightmare, and as Shadow Sorcery Minister Beelzebub Preposteror's thumb-striking clock counts down each hour with an "Ouch!", Minister Preposteror draws closer to missing his midnight deadline forfulfilling his annual quota of evil deeds and being "foreclosed." Up against a tight deadline and threats from His Hellish Excellency, the Minister of Pitch Darkness himself, Preposteror has all but given up when the...

Introduces a variety of toys and games with unusual qualities such as a Glowing Teddy, a Sheep Toboggan, Animal Umbrellas, and Jumping Boots.

Wondrous things happen when Anna Lavinia, a young girl who lives in a distant house behind a grove of pawpaw trees, sets off to travel to her aunt's house.

"All of Us is a collective history of the world, told from an uncommon point of view. Written in the first-person plural, All of Us is a book of our history, emphasizing our unity as a species, beginning with the birth of our planet and our common origins in Africa, and describing how we came to be who we are in all our numerous guises. As hunter-gatherers and nomads, inventors of tools, farmers and breeders, we evolved in various ways, influenced...

After hibernating for the winter, a bear wakes up to discover that a huge factory has been built over his cave and that nobody believes he is a bear.