Product Description
A book about dressing up, for children. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Paper, water and flour
You can make a fake tooth with paper, water and flour.Children think that's a pretty smart idea until Russell Hoban's whimsical tooth fairies propose making a fake child out the same material.For children whose teeth are falling out regularly, this is a superb and very funny adventure story.It's good for grandparents, too.And the drawings are wonderful, especially when the toy car gets involved in a car chase.Every household with toothless children should have this book.

Memorable Classic!
I hadn't thought about this book for over 30 years, but now that I have a six year old daughter, it all came back to me.This is a wonderful story about Jack and his sister, Daisy, who try to fool the tooth fairy when Jack looses his loose tooth.They make a fake one out of flour and water and put it under his pillow.When the tooth fairy comes to visit that night, the adventure really begins!They shrink down to "fairy size" and have to deal with the ethical issues presented with their situation.Every kid should read this over and over again. ... Read more

Product Description
A man builds a new table sturdy enough for an elephant to dance on and works up to a restaurant with twenty dancing elephants. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

For every restauranteur you know
Everybody knows somebody who owns a restaurant or WANTS to own a restaurant. This is the book for them! it is also a book for woodworkers and artisans who value perfection in their work (the owner of the 20 Elephant restaurant hates a table that wobbles and you need to put a matchbook under the leg even BEFORE the elephants dance on it). In a perfect world, every town would have a 20 Elephant Restaurant where talents and craftsmanship are valued more highly than "you want fries with that?" and paper hats.

so wonderful I can't believe this has never been reviewed
I first read this book fifteen or so years ago when I was a university student. I was studying literature at the time and had just read Riddley Walker. I had the privilege to hear Hoban speak at the time and read from Pilgerman which was then a work in progress. As for this book, I noticed Hoban had also written children's stories so I started collecting them. I will just say Twenty Elephant Restaurant is one of the most simple, wonderful and beautiful things ever written. I now read it and other of RH's stories to my children who love them. Thank you and god bless you Mr Hoban. ... Read more

Product Description
Crocodile chases after Pierrot the clown who has stolen his doll. Includes word identifications for many of the objects and individuals appearing in the illustrations. ... Read more

Product Description
When the monster from his favorite holiday monster film climbs right out of the television, Jim Hedgehog must use his wits to handle the creature. ... Read more

Product Description
When the Mole family finds out about Christmas and the fat man in the red suit, they ask for a telescope to help them see the stars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

fantastic children's book
i was given this book as a child and absolutely LOVED IT!!!about 20 years ago, i tracked it down again (my childhood copy was long gone) thru a bookseller in morgantown, wv.it was tough, but we found it!now everyone has it so much easier!just click and there it is.every kid should a copy of this book!!

wonderful story for older kids
This is a wonderful story for elementary school kids.It is in-between picture book and "chapter book" length-- not a quick read.The story is very heartwarming, and the illustrations are beautiful and endearing.

One of my very favorite Christmas stories!It is worth buying a used copy if that is all you can find (you can find really nice hardback or paperback versions).

Clever story
This superb Christmas picture book deserves a rediscovery! In understatedly witty text, it tells the story of Delver mole, a young mole who lives underground and knows nothing of Christmas. One day he hears about it from a mouse, and wonders if this "fat man in a red suit" will bring him his dearest wish - a telescope so that he can see the stars. (Being very nearsighted as most moles are, he has never seen them.) Risking the peril of facing the local owl, Delver and his family build an above-ground chimney and leave a letter for Santa. They then fall asleep waiting on Christmas eve in the open, and are about to be snatched up by the owl when, in a curious and believable way, the owl finds some Christmas spirit and is duly rewarded by Santa, who also brings the telescope for Delever. The illustrations are memorable and the story is a complete charmer. Highly recommened for kids preschool through grade 2.

A terrific Christmas book
This picture book is my favorite "animal" Christmas book.The drawings and narrative are both charming and the story is not sacharine, but,in the best sense, heart-warming. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Off the tip of a well-worn tongue
They all get around to it eventually. Updike gave his septuagenarian Bech a twenty-six-year-old grad-student assistant who improbably wanted his babies; Bellow had his young secretary-wife hold his desiccated body in the lapping waves and sing "Hap-py, happy Sol-o-mon;" and, most recently and most stingingly, Roth gave his Professor of Desire a graduate seminar in mortality as viewed through a plate of twenty-nothing puttanesca--a Cuban hottie whose bounteous breasts are a missile crisis of autumnal rot.

So why should not the British cult writer Russell Hoban get his turn? Like Kubrick in that double bill of yearning toward amniotic bliss, EYES WIDE SHUT and A.I., Hoban sees one brand of medication for the pain of failing daylight: the tender vent we all call home. In this hiccuppingly eccentric, deliberately minor-key novel, Hoban places his own alter ego, an impotent, diabetic, sclerotic art historian, at a worshipful stoop before a website called Angelica's Grotto. [....]Here, a feminist grad student lures potential wankers with homemade still-photo porn and 1-900-style storytelling. Hoban's aesthete, Harold Klein, is fascinated--and thus begins an improbable series of adventures that includes Angelica's accepting Klein's tongue into her grotto (out of "curiosity") and climaxes with an act of vengeance against a black stud that would make Norman Mailer and James Toback blush and hold hands.

Hey--if the Yanks can do it, let it all hang out, finally admit that they're doing it for the nookie, why can't a dotty, attention-deficited, crazy-quilt-headed old prof like Hoban drop trou too? His version certainly has more charm and gentleness, and is pointedly less misogynistic and more self-candid, than lusty-old-goat cannonades like Updike's ROGER'S VERSION or Roth's DYING ANIMAL. But like all contemporary British novelists who mark themselves as middle-class or above, Hoban is less a slave to the tang than to a public-school education. Hard, crumbly bits of German phraseology, twice-removed references to scenes from ORLANDO FURIOSO, a smug description of a dinner chat about "Klimt and Kieslowski," clot the soup and interrupt the tasty parts. Hoban still feels the urge to name-drop and to cerebralize--even though the drop-kick at the climax of the novel is that a horny old coot will literally drop a million bucks just to wet his whistle on a butchy grad student who doesn't always smell so good. [....] Like a milder, post-Zoloft Peter Greenaway, Hoban's hands flit through Jansen's History of Art and the O.E.D. while his eyes dart toward the busty sylph at the cappuccino cart.

Americans may just want him to get on with it--and get over it. Less rageful and accusatory than his American analogs, Hoban also commits a sin they don't--he puts on a slightly Mitteleuropa, who-little-old-me? act. The Angelica character calls him on it, but he keeps it up, as it were--making himself seem meek, mild, lamely inquisitive, prodding at his willingness to sacrifice all for sex as if it were a fancy, unfamiliar cushion that somehow wound up on a kitchen chair. The Americans plowing this terrain own up more freely to the bawl of their soon-to-be-terminal inner child. For their sourness, the Updike and Roth versions of the old-man-with-an-itch have a bitter grandeur, and an impressive surrender before the mysterious simplicity of our biological hardwiring. Hoban tries to stave off anxiety with art-review chatter and three-card-monte cultural crossreference. [...]

Unwittingly, ANGELICA'S GROTTO demonstrates a peculiar neurosis of the aging urban intelligentsia that is the only real drama the book permits: the arm-wrestle between "I wanna go out and live!" and "Eek--a germ!" [....] Some may find Hoban's avuncular, donnish treatment of this vacillation surprisingly warm and humane. Everyone else will find himself speeding through the pages, eager to get back to a world where Hoban's issues can be discussed without the mimeographed proprieties of a teacher-student conference.

hoban's head is dreaming us
Fantastic, moving novel, from Hoban's increasingly fertile and prolific late period. You've read what it's about. Like all Hoban's novels, this is concerned with the relationship between reality and fantasy; and as with all his best (Riddley Walker, Turtle Diary, and the new one, Amaryllis Night and Day), the difference between these is rendered uncertain. Hoban's writing represents a gritty, everyday, totally honest species of Magic Realism which leaves out glamour and sfx to suggest that the way we all behave is deeply and inevitably conditioned by our fears, histories, hopes, dreams and desires; and ultimately that these get the upper hand over some objective idea of what the real world is or some standard of correct behaviour. Thus, 72-year-old Klein experiences a latelife Yeatsian erotic upsurge which leads him to do all sorts ofweird, dangerous, and entertaining things beyond his own immediate comprehension. These things are logical and inevitable, like the mad things we all do are. Klein is a great character: old, cranky, bright, experimental, on-the-case, natural, honest - and lonely; Hoban's best creation since Riddley. The book has wise and empowering things to say about the importance of the internal in public life - as well as the challenges and dangers of trying to honour it. Plus, it is an extremely funny and constantly engaging insight into what it's like to be old but deeply clued-in, contemporary, and not yet sexually dormant. I hope I end up like Klein (but you can spare me the weird stuff). High art delivered in an easy package, Angelica's Grotto is a resonant, unforgettable, wise novel written in beautiful, spare, epigrammatic prose with great humour and concision. You can start and finish it on a local flight. Buy.

Steamy Hoban-Antics!
Vastly enjoyable for the linguistic acrobatics as for the sarcastic viewpoint of the central character, Klein. I found myself giggling particularly at his old-man impatience with others, including his comic psychiatrist, further humour value coming from outbursts worthy of a sufferer of Turet's Syndrome. And yet it is a very clever novel. As a reader, you travel with him as he becomes embroiled in a tale of his own dangerous indulgence and insiduously become an unwitting voyeur... ... Read more

Product Description
An inexplicable message flashed onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him 'to those places in your head that you can't get to on your own'-and plunges him into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait-and a frequency of Medusas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Intensely moving. This is very beautiful.
A friend recommended Riddley Walker, but I couldn't find it so I picked this book off the shelf instead. I had no idea what to expect, the first few pages of a book are always a little hard for me to invest in, but I tell you I'm so, so happy that I didn't walk away.

I'm amazing that such an incredible writer has not gotten more attention. This book is beautiful, infused with mythology, and so incredibly poignant. I haven't read Riddley Walker, but even if The Medusa Frequency doesn't meet those standards-- it definitely breaks the lukewarm standards of books of thousands of lukewarm books that are in print right now.

It feels like the universe, existential human worries, and the most beautiful love all coming together.

Hoban keeps getting better and better!
Although Russell Hoban will always be listed as 'author of Mouse and his Child, Turtle Diary and Riddley Walker', books like Medusa Frequency (and Pilgermann as well) give evidence that Hoban is not merely an author with afew great books up his sleeve but one who continues to hammer out atreatice on the heart of human experience, and it is one which becomes moreprecise with each outing.Though only half the size of Riddley Walker, TheMedusa Frequency examines universal/archetypal themes through dark humorand mythological allegory.Because Hoban is a real master of language, notstopping with where the meaning of words cut off, but moving beyond them,he seemingly accomplishes more then Jung does over thousands of pages.Itfeels weird to be comparing fiction to authors like D.T. Suzuki, but thequote in regards to the latter: "he combined the innocence of a childwith the holiness of a saint." could easily be applied to Hoban;easily one of the best authors still writing.

Hoban is back!
Since first reading Hoban's Riddley Walker almost twenty years ago, I have searched for other books that spoke as well to the cynical, questing artistic soul at the end of the twentieth century.They have been few, andrare, and mostly out of print in America.I approached this work withtrepidation, fearing that it could not match the charm and spirit of thisauthor's seminal masterpiece.I was wrong.From the first NNVSNUTSRUNGH, The Medusa Frequency establishes a new paradox of myth andmachine, leading its reader, and its hero, through a humorous quest fortrue love, true work, and the meaning of life.The hero, Herman Orff,is a novelist without profit who writes classic comics for a living.Aftera late-night conversation from his computer monitor puts him in touch witha primordial reality, the comfortable fabric of his reality begins tounravel. His visit to a musician of his acquaintance leads him into anotherelectronic encounter, with subsequent and unpredictable visits from thedrowned head of Orpheus.His job writing comic books is terminated whenthe editor decides to "go glossy," trading the comic series foran x-rated magazine of classical Greek themes.Throughout, Herman isenticed by curiosity about the fate of his lost love, Luise, although heeagerly pursues the the prospect of a new love in one Melanie Falsepercy,whose legs speak to his soul.Vermeer's Head of a Young Girl and Eurydiceof the Orpheus legend also compete for Herman's attention--andunderstanding.Herman's quest and the resolution of his contemporarydilemma remain quixotic--and strangely satisfying. As one might expect,Hoban's love of words and language give richness to this tale and extendits influence to the subliminal pleasures of certain sounds and rhythms. While this work does not surpass Riddley Walker, with its masterfulre-creation of the English language, it brings a delightful, and humorousnew perspective to life in our times. ... Read more

Product Description
Father has had a long hard day at work. A sorely trying day indeed. He wants to sit down and put his feet up and rest. But what does he find when he arrives home? Commotion, consternation, confusion, chaos rule! How to get to the bottom of it? How to restore some semblance of proper order?

The investigation, reluctantly begun, expands in widening circles to take in the whole family, as finger points to pointing finger. Perhaps everyone is to blame? Perhaps to set things straight everyone just needs to sit down, say sorry, and start over again?

That family life is just that simple and never quite that simple is the message Russell and Lillian Hoban, the creators of such classics as Bread and Jam for Frances, A Little Sister for Frances, and The Little Brute Family, bring alive in this cleverly fashioned and heartwarmingly illustrated tale of a house in uproar. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fun and cute book - doesn't hold young children's interests well.
I was introduced to this book as a teen and fell in love with it.I recently bought it for my kids, but they aren't thrilled with it - yet.My oldest is 5 yrs.I'm thinking 8 yrs might be a good age. ... Read more

Product Description
Tom is so good at fooling around that he does little else. His Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who thinks this is too much like having fun, calls upon the fearsome Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach him a lesson. So the Captain challenges Tom to three rounds of womble, muck, and sneedball, certain that he will win. However, when it comes to fooling around, Tom doesn't fool around, and his skills prove so polished that the results of the contest are completely unexpected. . . ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Great from age 4-80
This is a book I loved dearly when a child...Most of the books I read (and they were many!) and their authors are long forgotten...but not Mr. Quentin Blake!

More greasy bloaters
We read hundreds of books to our three children.This was my favorite as well as that of our kids.Thank goodness that the book has finally been republished in time for our grandchildren.My three year old grandson enjoyed the contests between Tom and Captain Najork as much as his dad had.

Najork, Wonkem Strong, and Greasy Bloaters
This was my favorite book as a child. The concept of a boy beating a gang of "hired sportsmen," because of his exceptional ability for fooling around appealed to me on the primordial level. Additional details such as Tom being forced to eat the disgustingly awesome meal of "Greasy Bloaters and Potato Slog," captured my imagination, and still are referenced from time-to-time by my siblings and I. This is simply an awesome book, and deserves to be republished, although there are reasonably priced used copies available if you know where to look. This is a 'Grade A' childrens book that is especially appealing to naughty little boys.

For all ages.
This gem is a great yarn for children - it should also be a compulsory text for technical managers, as it is a parable on the virtues of creativity and freedom of expression. (no kidding, or maybe just a little!)

best children's book ever.
This is, quite simply, the best children's book ever written. The story and the illustrations are brilliant. I still own the copy I had as a child, and can't wait to read it to my daughter, once she's old enough to appreciate it. It's hilarious and twisted and clever and wonderful in the way that classic childrens' books should be. ... Read more

Product Description
Three space travelers land on Earth in order to sample the cheese omelettes and chocolate cake being prepared by a mummosaurus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Invigoratingly imaginative
Russell Hoban's book, They Came From Aargh!, is absolutely memorable, funny and one of the most imaginative books of any kind that my husband and I had the pleasure of reading to our son, who is now 25 years old. ... Read more

Product Description
Many different creatures live in and around the country pond, hunting, eating, playing, sleeping, giving birth. "Ponders" depicts incidents in the lives of some of these creatures including Jim Frog, Lavinia Bat, Big John Turtle, Grover Crow and Starboy Mole. ... Read more