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When Father comes home at the end of a sorely trying day, he finds all the family fighting and scolding after a sequence of events for which no one is willing to take the blame.
(The New York Review Children's Collection edition)
In Riddley Walker, thousands of years in our future, the people of Inland are trying to drag themselves out of the mud. Theirs is a post-nuclear society hungry for a story to make sense of what’s happened. They have no creation myth, only hellish narratives of destruction played out in the Eusa...
Soonchild tells the story of a shaman known as Sixteen-Face John, who lives in a cold, snowy region referred to as "The North," and who fears he's losing his way in the modern world. He increasingly spends his time "drinking Coca-Cola and watching TV with his feet up and reading magazines with...
The only thing Frances will eat is bread and jam. "How do you know what you'll like if you won't even try anything?" asks Father. But Frances is not tempted by eggs or string beans until clever Mother finds the answer...
The third and probably the best known title in Russell Hoban's Frances the...
Russell Hoban's final short story was written specially for the Exhibition Road Show, a festival held in London in July-August 2012.
The story appears in Road Stories, a collection by various writers inspired by London's Exhibition Road, home to many of the city's great museums including the...
‘This is it ... this is my destiny woman,' Max blurted out when he first met Lola at the Coliseum shop. Not only was she aristocratic and wild at heart, but the two discovered an uncanny convergence of musical tastes. Soon they were converging at every level - Lola filling Max's emptiness and vice...
From the jacket:
There is a strangeness about Christabel Alderton. Elias Newman can see it right away, as well he might. When Christabel was thirteen she was walking by the River Lea and some people in a cabin cruiser waved to her. The scene before her seemed to freeze like a photograph and she...
Summary:Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the black sparkle of deep space a figure in a blue overall tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor...
Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which seventy-two-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities, known to medical consultants as ‘he who declines to hop the twig', may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going...
The Mouse and His Child is the story of two clockwork mice, a father and son. When the key in the father's back is wound, he dances in a circle, swinging his son up and down. They begin their existence in the warmth of a toy shop at Christmastime, surrounded by fellow windup toys; all the mouse...
