Folklore and Fairy Tales

The Painted Wall And Other Strange Tales (Aesop Accolades (Awards))

Honor Book for the Society of School Librarians International’s Best Book Award – Language Arts, Grades K-6 Novels. Selected as one of four recipients of the 2004 Aesop Accolade. Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Fiction Titles 2003. At about the time the Grimm Brothers were gathering their famous collection of folk stories and fairy tales in Europe, in China a similar collection of almost five hundred stories had just been compiled by the scholar Pu Sing-ling. Drawing on oral and written sources, he called his collection of the strange and wondrous Strange Tales from a Studio of Leisure. The fruits of his life’s work become immensely popular with storytellers who performed the stories in teahouses, where rapt audiences would sit for half a day drinking tea and listening to tales of ghosts, fox fairies, and other wonders. Almost unknown in the West, the stories are given new life in this important work by the masterful Michael Bedard.

Grandma Chickenlegs

In this variation of the traditional Baba Yaga story, a young girl must rely on the advice of her dead mother and her special doll when her wicked stepmother sends her to get a needle from Grandma Chickenlegs.

Anno’s Twice Told Tales

This book presents two tales from the Brothers Grimm, combined with Mr. Fox’s highly unusual interpretations of them.

The Moon Maiden And Other Asian Folktales

Twelve folktales of China & East Asia come alive in this brightly illustrated children’s book. A great addition to world folktale collections.

Willow Pattern Story, The

The author retells a story heard as a child, one of many invented to explain the landscape on willow pattern china, popular for the last 200 years. In this, two young Chinese lovers are punished by one’s cruel mandarin father.

The Donkey and the Rock

In this version of a tale with many Asian variations, a wise king, who rules a town full of foolish people in the mountains of Tibet, puts a donkey and a rock on trial to settle the dispute between two honest men.