Books published by publisher NYR Children's Collection

“Pecos Bill had the strangest and most exciting experience any boy ever had. He became a member of a pack of wild Coyotes, and until he was a grown man, believed that his name was Cropear, and that he was a full-blooded Coyote. Later he discovered that he was a human being and very shortly thereafter became the greatest cowboy of all time. This is how it all came about.”A Newbery Honor book in 1938, James Bowman’s PECOS BILL is the perfect introduction to a great American comic hero and to the delights of the American tall tale. Jolted off the back of his westward-bound pioneer family’s covered wagon, four-year-old Bill is left in the dust by his eighteen wawling and brawling siblings and never-suspecting mom and dad. Raised by coyotes as one of their own, Bill retains a natural innocence while developing a host of supernatural powers. When he finds out that he is a man, not a coyote, and returns to confront the often inhuman human world, those powers will come in handy. Bill never uses them maliciously, always for good, or simply to amaze and amuse.James Bowman was a fine folklorist and an outstanding storyteller and he relates Pecos Bill’s wild deeds in a plainspoken voice that highlights their wonderful swagger and charm. With lively color and black-and-white illustrations by Laura Bannon, Bowman’s PECOS BILL remakes bedrock American myth into a novel full of high adventure, outrageous fantasy, laughter, and sheer fun.

Night falls and Cat Country comes to life: town walls turn into roads, roof and treetop become mountain and field. The black cat Carbonel and his consort, Queen Blandamour, have long reigned over this magical place, where humans are scarce, cats roam freely, and the rivers flow with cream. But the wicked Grisana, a beautiful gray Persian who makes Lady Macbeth look like a lap cat, has plans of her own for Cat Country, and Carbonel and his children, Prince Calidor and Princess Pergamond, are all that stand between her and the throne. With the backing of Carbonel’s old foe, the witch Mrs. Cantrip, and her apprentice, Miss Dibdin, Grisana may be unstoppable.Luckily, Carbonel can count on Rosemary and John, his young friends from Carbonel: The King of the Cats, to come to his aid. Together with the good creatures of Cat Country—and with the help of a few magical spells—the children confront Grisana and her nasty crew. It is a battle for the future of Cat Country and only the strongest magic will prevail.

Black and Littlejack are bad men. Littlejack has a map that indicates the existence of a treasure on a far and lonely island. He needs a ship to get there. Black has a ship. So they team up and sail off on Black’s vessel, the Aeiu. “A weird uncanny name,” remarks Littlejack, “like a nightbird screaming.” Black explains that it’s all the vowels except for O. O he hates since his mother got wedged in a porthole. They couldn’t pull her in so they had to push her out.Black and Littlejack arrive at the port of the far and lonely island and demand the treasure. No one knows anything about it, so they have their henchmen ransack the place—to no avail. But Black has a better idea: he will take over the island and he will purge it of O.The vicissitudes visited on the islanders by Black and Littlejack, the harsh limits of a life sans O (where shoe is she and woe is we), and how finally with a little luck and lots of pluck the islanders shake off their tyrannical interlopers and discover the true treasure for themselves (Oh yes—and get back their O’s)—these are only some of the surprises that await readers of James Thurber’s timelessly zany fairy tale about two louts who try to lock up the language—and lose.

A magnificently illustrated Chinese folklore tale about a tigress, a seer, a King, and the prince, who must leave his family and learn the ways of the tigers so that the war between man and animal can end.Deep in the Great Forest, a tigress is mourning the death of her tiger babies who have been killed by hunters. Seeking revenge, she attacks the villages, destroying houses and prompting the king to gather his army. But a seer named Lao Lao warns the king that if he angers the tigress further she will destroy the kingdom. Lao Lao counsels the king to give his own son to the tigress and promises that no harm will come to the boy. The next morning, the king brings the prince to the edge of the Great Forest and tells him, “Now you must go on alone.” To end the war between man and animal, the prince must forget his human ways and begin to learn what tigers know. The Tiger Prince was inspired by The Tigress, a late Shang dynasty bronze vessel in the Cernuschi Museum in Paris depicting a scene from the Chinese folktale of a baby raised by a tigress.

A Carnegie Medal Honor BookTwelve-year-old Smith is a denizen of the mean streets of eighteenth-century London, living hand to mouth by virtue of wit and pluck. One day he trails an old gentleman with a bulging pocket, deftly picks it, and as footsteps ring out from the alley by which he had planned to make his escape, finds himself in a tough spot. Taking refuge in a doorway, he sees two men emerge to murder the man who was his mark. They rifle the dead man’s pockets and finding them empty, depart in a rage. Smith, terrified, flees the scene of the crime. What has he stolen that is worth the life of a man?Smith is a gripping, engrossing, and utterly diverting tale of high adventure related by a writer whose scintillating style is matched only by the dazzle of his plotting. In the words of Lloyd Alexander, “Garfield is unmatched for sheer exciting storytelling. The reader simply can’t stop reading him.”

An Easter story for young readers. This is the tale of a little church mouse named Cheerful who lives in the city with his parents; his brother, Solemnity; and his sisters, Faith and Hope. Cheerful and his brother and sisters spend their time frolicking in the rainbow shadows cast by the church’s stained-glass windows and dining on the crumbs of wedding cakes. But while Solemnity, Faith, and Hope are happy to live in the bustling city, Cheerful’s favorite spot has always been the greenest patches of light under the windows. His dream is to settle in the country, and one day he bids his family farewell and sets off on an adventure.Palmer Brown’s intricate filigreed drawings turn this sweet, simple story into an instrument of enchantment as glorious as a rose window and as intimate as the spun-sugar Easter egg that will finally carry Cheerful to his pastoral home.

In The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjeon mischievously tilts our workaday world to reveal its wonders and follies. Her selection of her favorite stories describes powerful—and sometimes exceedingly silly—monarchs, and commoners who are every bit their match; musicians and dancers who live for aft rather than earthly reward; and a goldfish who wishes to “marry the Moon, surpass the Sun, and possess the World.”

BY THE AUTHOR OF The Big Orange Splot, The Neddiad, and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor has plenty of time to indulge himself and to try a few things he’s been curious about. Exploring the nearby city of Hogboro, he runs into a curious character known as the Chicken Man (a reference to his companion, an intelligent hen named Claudia who lives under his hat). The Chicken Man speaks brilliant nonsense, but he seems to be hip to the lizard musicians (real lizards, not men in lizard suits) who’ve begun appearing on Victor’s television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Are the lizards from outer space? From “other space”? Together Victor and the Chicken Man, guided by the able Claudia, journey to the lizards’ floating island, a strange and fantastic place that operates with an inspired logic of its own.

In The Two Cars the celebrated husband and wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, famous for their illustrated versions of Norse and Greek myths, offer young children a playful modern twist on the ancient fable of the tortoise and the hare.Two cars sit side by side in the same garage. One is fast, shiny, and ready to go; the other is a comfortable old jalopy, a little worse for wear but as reliable as can be. On a magic moonlit night, the doors of the garage swing open and they head out for a spin, each determined to prove that he is the “best car on the road.” Over hill and dale and roundabout they go, encountering—and narrowly missing—trains, trucks, wildlife, and even, in the form of a policeman on a motorcycle, the long arm of the law. Before the two cars’ nocturnal caper is over, each will have discovered the being the “best” is not so simple as you might suppose.

Who but Russell Hoban could weave a tale of life’s pleasures and pain around a candy pig? And who but Quentin Blake could make the most poignant of stories so lighthearted and delightful? In this episodic picture book by an inimitable author-illustrator duo, a fantastic chain of events is triggered by the unacknowledged fall of a marzipan pig behind the sofa. We meet in quick succession a heartsick mouse, a lonely grandfather clock, an owl in love with a taxi meter, a worker bee, a fading hibiscus flower, a mouse who greets the dawn dancing, and finally a boy who guesses at the true relations between things. Appealing to the unsentimental yet sensitive nature of children, The Marzipan Pig is exquisitely attuned to the bittersweet wonder of life and to the sentience of all beings.

Baguette, a seemingly ordinary house cat, is a descendant of the magic Catlanteans who lived long ago in peace and happiness on the island of Catlantis. When he falls in love with the seductive alley cat Purriana, she insists Baguette accomplish a heroic feat before she’ll agree to marriage. They pay a visit to the oracle, Purriana’s great-great grandmother, who reveals to the surprised Baguette the secret of his bloodline and the special inheritance of all ginger descendants of the Catlanteans: the ability to time travel. She relates the cat-astrophe that befell Baguette’s ancestors when Catlantis was struck by storms and sank to the bottom of the Catlantic Ocean. Now Baguette must travel into the past in order to bring back the Catlantic flowers that will grant every cat nine lives. All the cats of the world have been awaiting his deed, but can Baguette, a lovesick tabby, fulfill the prophecy?

When Catherine Storr’s daughter was very small, she was afraid of the wolf under her bed, so every night her mother would tell her a story in which Polly outwitted the wolf. These bedtime stories eventually became the collection Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, a wonderfully thrilling and reassuring series of adventures in which the clever, independent, and unstoppable Polly fools the persistent, hungry young wolf time and again. In a match much like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner but more polite and quick-witted, Polly and the wolf develop ever-more complicated ways of turning the tables on each other as they grow older and, in Polly’s case at least, wiser. Three more collections of stories followed the original Clever Polly, all hilariously inventive variations on a much loved theme, and all of the stories are collected here for the first time.