Showing results for "August House" in All Categories

A children's librarian, Margaret Read MacDonald, and a traditional musician, Richard Scholtz, combine voice, dulcimer, and autoharp to enliven stories for families and children in libraries and at storytelling festivals nationwide.

Expanding upon the four-line nursery rhyme, storyteller David Novak spins an epic tale as young Itsy prepares to attempt what no spider has done before: scale the water spout. A nervous Mother Bitsy prepares her little Itsy as nourishing lunch; a fly salad sandwich, a bag of grasshopper chips, and a bottle of fresh-squeezed moth juice (100% natural). The result is an epic on a child's scale, in which determination, concentration, and grit are championed.

In this cumulative retelling of an ancient and widely circulated legend, storyteller Heather Forest shows that when each person makes a small contribution, the collective impact can be huge. Illustrated by Susan Gaber.

Family storytelling at its most hilarious, the Maynard Moose tales of Willy Claflin entertain all ages. An excellent choice for family car trips, these whimsical retellings excite young imaginations and delight young and old with their creative use of language.

Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

If you're looking for the scariest stories you can get your ears on, your search is over. Accomplished storyteller Roberta Simpson Brown unfolds her thrilling stories for listeners of all ages.

Many years ago, the proudest animal in the jungle was not the peacock. The proudest animal was the tiger. In this folktale from Vietnam, we see how Tiger's pride leads him to covet wisdom and, with the help of a wise farmer, earn his stripes. Illustrated by Baird Hoffmire.

She is a living icon of the family storytelling renaissance in America. And to hear her tell it, Kathryn Tucker Windham owes it all to her father, the small-town banker, school-board chairman, and Sunday school superintendent who always came home with a story. These stories celebrate the father he was and the stories that are his legacy.

When the Southern Bells brought the telephone to rural North Carolina, it looked like a "big black daffodil". What the telephone company had not counted on in conceiving its eight-party line service was a pair of "past-middle-age, unmarried sisters", the chatty Misses Lucy and Lena Leatherwood. Once the Leatherwood sisters were connected by the Southern Bells, nobody else on that line had a chance!

"What is your favorite story?" is the question children across the country often ask professional storyteller Pleasant DeSpain. As he attempts to answer, his list grows longer and longer, until he confesses he likes them all. An untiring researcher of oral traditions, DeSpain is known for his concise versions of world folktales specifically crafted for retelling. This new, digital recording of 10 stories is excerpted from DeSpain's 22 Splendid Tales to Tell from Around the World, Volume One.

In Edgar Allan Poe's eerie title story, an old man's diseased eye drives the narrator to murder. But while the murderer can rid himself of the eye, he can't silence the old man's heart.

These shivery tales were collected from the oral tradition, from people all over the Southwest, and represent the rich cultural diversity of the region, from the Ozarks to the Rio Grande, California to the Big Thicket.

Old Man Hawkins was a larger-than-life character among deer hunters, or, more precisely, among tellers and hearers of tall tales. His self-proclaimed method of hunting deer by holding a mirror in one hand and his rifle in the other, pointing backward over a shoulder, was, he said, "to be fair to the deer". It was a story, Davis tells us, that would occupy his father on the drive to Grandma's house.

Around the world each night, parents tell stories to children as they put them to bed. Margaret Read MacDonald - a folklorist, storyteller, and children's librarian - uses bedtime tales in the daytime to end her story hours on a calm note. Here, with accompaniment on dulcimer and autoharp by musician Richard Scholtz, she includes seven of her favorites from around the world.

If you have never ridden a mule along a 48-inch wide trail whose ledge drops off, in places, 700 feet to the Colorado River, straight down, you may have difficulty picturing the temporary insanity that leads otherwise responsible adults to sign away the remainder of their natural life expectancy just for the chance to see the Grand Canyon's natural beauty close-up.

When storyteller David Novak asked a young girl what she wanted for dinner, the answer he got was "Cookies!" That girl didn't get cookies for dinner, but she did get a story.

Former teachers Richard and Judy Dockrey Young bring their frightening performances alive on tape with 14 ghost stories from the American Southeast.

Su cara lo hace distinto y él solo quiere ser uno más. Camina siempre mirando al suelo, la cabeza gacha, y con el flequillo tratando en vano de esconder su rostro, pero, aun así, es objeto de miradas furtivas, susurros ahogados y codazos de asombro. August sale poco. Su vida transcurre entre las acogedoras paredes de su casa, entre la compañía de su familia, su perra Daisy, y las increíbles historias de La guerra de las galaxias.

Donald Davis was born into a southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up listening to his father and his Uncle Frank tell stories of their boyhood, all the while taking in the details of his own childhood experience.

"Years later," Donald Davis remember of his childhood," I came to realize that when you come from a long-dammed-up Scots-Irish gene pool it is an okay thing to wish for something, but it is not an OK thing to get it."