Childrens Literature Studies

Flight is the hilarious and tragic story of an orphaned Indian boy - "Zits" - who travels back and forth through time in a charged search for his true identity. With powerful, swift prose, Flight follows the troubled teenager as he learns that violence is not the answer.

Danny Calvert thinks part of American society is about to crash and burn. Capitalism, if he's lucky. But when a college friend dies in jail, he joins an apocalyptic religious cult and begins printing the increasingly dark writings of its charismatic leader. Father Joseph says "unless you become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven." But "become like children" means just that. Father Joseph moves his followers to Europe to avoid scrutiny, and controls them such that Danny isn't allowed to marry Deborah, the woman he loves, but is forced to marry someone else.

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the "old ones" still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and complex, unforgettable characters.

For over half a century, scholars have labored to show that C. S. Lewis' famed but apparently disorganized Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance, and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery.

In an immersive, exciting narrative nonfiction format, this powerful book follows a selection of people who experienced the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Professional storytellers Richard Alan Young and Judy Dockrey Young have scoured the Ozarks to collect these authentic stories. They spin culturally reflective stories that can be enjoyed by children and adults alike, including: "The Meanest Man in Arkansaw", "The Cold-Trailing Coon Dog", "The Blacksnake Lie", "What the Doctor Said", "The 17-Minute Sermon", and more.

Learn about the job of a garbage collector and how a garbage truck works.

Learn how a freight train is operated.

A true crime thriller - the first book for teens to tell the nearly unknown tale of the brazen attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body! The action begins in October of 1875, as Secret Service agents raid the workshop of master counterfeiter Ben Boyd. Soon after Boyd is arrested, members of his counterfeiting ring gather to discuss how to spring their ringleader. Their plan: grab Lincoln's body from its Springfield tomb, stash it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, and demand, as a ransom, the release of Ben Boyd - and $200,000 in cash.

The Reconstruction and Rise of Jim Crow describes the fallout of the Civil War, whose aftermath left the United States South angry and poor. This book details the struggles to decide how to deal with the newly freed slaves, through the years of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and segregation. The storyline also sets the stage for the country’s next battle, which is between the Jim Crow laws and the 14th and 15th Amendments.

The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkein, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland, as an only son of a prosperous civil engineer. He entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of 17 and studied to be an engineer to follow his father in the family business; however, he soon realized that he was not cut out for that profession. His father agreed to let him study law instead and although Stevenson graduated from the law school, he never practiced law because, by then, he knew he wanted to be a writer.

It’s 1938, and twelve-year-old Edith is about to move from the tiny German village she’s lived in all her life to a place that seems as foreign as the moon: Chicago, Illinois. And she will be doing it alone. This dramatic and chilling novel about one girl’s escape from Hitler’s Germany was inspired by the experiences of the author’s mother, one of fourteen-hundred children rescued by Americans as part of the One Thousand Children project.

Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her.

A Child's Garden of Verses is a book of poetry for children. Stevenson dedicated the poems to his nurse, Cummy (Alison Cunningham), who cared for him during his many childhood illnesses. The collection includes some of Stevenson's most famous poems, including “The Land of Counterpane”, “My Shadow", and “The Lamplighter”.

Oscar Wilde's first play confronts the hypocrisy of public "morality" compared with genuine, private kindness. The reasons for its continued popularity are not difficult to identify: the play's witty dialogue contains many of Wilde's most quoted aphorisms, its stylish setting provides opportunities for elegant presentation, and its cast of memorable characters play out a story which is genuinely moving. This new audio production brings together a full cast worthy of Wilde's creative genius.

Attracting tens of thousands of men and women hoping to strike it rich, the Klondike gold rush brought with it a frenzy of activity unlike anything the world had ever seen. The few children who lived in Dawson City and its surrounding mining camps had front-row seats to this treasure hunt of the century - and to all the antics that a lust for gold brought with it. In this, her companion book to the best-selling Women of the Klondike, Frances Backhouse explores the experiences of the children who followed their parents north in search of fortune or were born in the goldfields.

The Greek myths were first told thousands of years ago, by poets and singers who wanted to tell how the world came to be. These brilliant stories are full of adventure and drama, but they also explore our deepest fears and fantasies. There's a reason these myths still feel so powerful—they've formed the foundations of narratives and archetypes that we see in today. Having changed the way we look at fairy tales in their last book, Karrie and Jon have turned to these ancient stories to see what magic their marvellous gender-swapping machine can work on them.

Jessie's worried she'll never be able to find her way around her new neighborhood. To her, it's a crazy maze of avenues, streets, and intersections. But then she meets a big kid named Sara, an expert map reader, and things take a new direction.

“Touching.” —The New York Times For fans of Humans of New York and PostSecret, a collection of raw, urgent, and heartfelt stories, shared anonymously. Helena Dea Bala was an exhausted and isolated DC lobbyist, suffocating under the weight of her student loan debt, when she decided to split...