L. Frank Baum's Oz Series

Fantasy lovers of all ages will rejoice at this chance to travel once again to the marvelous land of Oz! A California earthquake sends Dorothy Gale and her new friends--Zeb the farm boy, Jim the cab-horse, and Eureka the mischievous kitten--tumbling through a crack in the ground. Deep beneath the earth, Dorothy is reunited with her old friend the Wizard of Oz and his troupe of nine tiny piglets. Together, Dorothy, the Wizard, and their friends travel through many fantastic lands, where they encounter the Mangaboos, people growing like vegetables in the ground; cross the Valley of Voe, where dama-fruit has turned everyone invisible; and are captured by mysterious flying Gargoyles. At last, the intrepid travelers reach Oz, where they have many unforgettable encounters with such favorites as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, Princess Ozma and the wooden Sawhorse. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz was the fourth Oz adventure. First published in 1908, it has captured the imaginations of young readers and listeners for four generations. Now a new generation can discover these superb adventures for themselves. This deluxe gift edition faithfully reproduces the rare first edition, including all sixteen color plates and all fifty black-and-white illustrations by John R. Neill, as well as the original colorful endpapers. Afterword by Peter Glassman. A deluxe facsimile of the fourth Oz adventure--originally published in 1908--when Dorothy and the Wizard meet the Mangaboos. A Books of Wonder(R) Classic.

In The Witch Must Die, Sheldon Cashdan explores how fairy tales help children deal with psychological conflicts by projecting their own internal struggles between good and evil onto the battles enacted by the characters in the stories. Not since Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment has the underlying significance of fantasy and fairy tales been so insightfully and entertainingly mined.

The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.

Intriguing investigation of fairy-tale images in Atwood's haunting fiction, poetry, & artwork.