New Releases by Russell Hoban

Celebrate Christmas with the inspiration for the beloved Jim Henson film — in print after over 40 years. In 1977, when Jim Henson debuted the now-classic film Emmet Otter''s Jug-Band Christmas, few knew it was based on a story written and illustrated by Russell and Lillian Hoban, creators of Bread and Jam for Frances and other treasured children''s books. With an enduring score by the great Paul Williams, the movie remains a holiday tradition in homes across America. Now the book that started it all is back in print, in a beautiful gift edition that will thrill Muppets fans young and old. Inspired by the classic tale "The Gift of the Magi," the story begins in a poor country cottage, as Emmet Otter dreams of buying Ma a piano for Christmas, while Ma dreams of buying Emmet a guitar. When a village talent contest is announced, both imagine their dreams coming true. But what they don''t imagine finding is their real reward — the power of love, family, and hope in hard times. It is a story that reaches into a reader''s heart and reminds us all that fortune favors the brave. A Bank Street College of Education Best Children''s Book of the Year "[A] welcome reissue of the Hobans'' 1971 story . . . Colorful illustrations of the close-knit animal community contain plenty of warmth." —The Horn Book

When Kleinzeit, an advertising copywriter whose name means either ''hero'' or ''smalltime'', depending on who you ask, picks up a sheet of yellow paper in the London Underground, he doesn''t suspect that it will cause him to be fired from his job and admitted to hospital with geometrical pain in his hypotenuse. In Hospital Ward A4, Kleinzeit discovers he is not alone: his fellow patients also suffer from nonsensical but possibly deadly ailments which all have something strange in common. With the help of the beautiful night nurse and armed with a glockenspiel and a paperback of Thucydides, Kleinzeit escapes from hospital and finds himself plunged headlong into a wild and flickering netherworld of mystery involving the Underground, an enigmatic red-bearded man, a key, sheets of yellow paper, and Death himself ... A hilarious, surreal and completely unpredictable novel about one man''s search for reality, "Kleinzeit" (1974) is one of Russell Hoban''s best-loved works. ''Hoban is as funny and unusual as any writer around ... "Kleinzeit" is a sort of holy fool, a fierce, lonely intelligence desperately trying to make sense of a hopeless world. A tour de force.'' - "Evening Standard" ''Hoban is an extraordinarily talented novelist, an original mind in the era of mass-produced philosophers.'' - "Irish Times" ''Delightful ... "Kleinzeit"''s language is forever astonishing.'' - "Boston Globe"

Featuring Frog and Toad and seven other beloved I Can Read characters together, this collection of favorite easy-to-read I Can Read stories is full of familiar faces and comes with a free poster starring our most popular characters! This Level Two slipcase is perfect for children who read on their own but still need a little help. The collection includes the following eight new and classic Level Two I Can Read books: Amelia Bedelia and the Surprise Shower Best Seat in Second Grade Bread and Jam for Frances Flat Stanley and the Firehouse Frog and Toad All Year Marley’s Big Adventure Mouse Soup Pony Scouts: Pony Crazy

Russell Hoban’s moving, unflinching tale of a boy who finds bravery during illness is reimagined in graphic-novel format with art by Alexis Deacon. Asleep in his hospital bed, Jim dreams of a great lion with white teeth and amber eyes. This lion is Jim’s finder. According to Nurse Bami, everyone has a finder, a creature who comes looking for us when we are lost. But when the time comes for Jim’s operation, will his lion be able to find him and bring him safely home? Dramatically reimagined as a graphic novel by award-winning illustrator Alexis Deacon, with the inclusion of powerful dream sequences, Russell Hoban’s tale of a boy’s search for strength and courage will resonate with any child dealing with adversity.

Discovering that his soon-to-be-born first offspring, a soonchild, cannot hear the World Songs from her mother''s womb, Sixteen-Face John, an Arctic Circle shaman, embarks on a fantastical journey to different eras and in the forms of animals and demons to find the songs that will inspire the soonchild''s birth.

When eighty-three-year-old Irving Goodman falls in love with actress Justine Trimble she''s been dead for forty-seven years. Irving may not know how he''s going to attain his heart''s desire but he knows a man who does. Istvan Fallok, a wizard of high technology, sees her on Irving''s TV screen and hi-techs Justine out of the video tape and into present-day Soho - in black-and-white. As any reader of Bram Stoker will know, blood is the (full-colour) life and in order for Justine to retain her colour she has to be topped up now and then - by Irving and his friends and the odd passer-by. Things become a little complicated when Grace Kowalski brings a Justine Two into the picture and not surprisingly the curiosity of the police is soon aroused ...

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery ... Kleinzeit. In German that means ''hero''. Or ''smalltime''. It depends on whom you ask. ''Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other'' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Since the age of thirteen, Christabel Alderton has been troubled by a sort of second sight that works sometimes, but not always. Death is much on her mind because the men in her life tend to die before their time and she''s come to think she''s bad luck. Fascinated by Christabel, diabetologist Elias Newman is keen to know her better but she''s afraid of what might happen. Taking the reader from the River Lea via a haunted woodland bog, out to the crash of the Pacific surf on Kahakuloa Head in the Hawaiian Islands, this is Russell Hoban at his engrossing, inimitable best.

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.

Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell Clark''s life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an eighteenth-century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat. What did it mean? Sarah dealt in antiques and Roswell soon ran into her stalls in Chelsea and Covent Garden. His calling, which grew out of an obsession with crash-test dummies, was a bit harder to explain. It led from the invention of a popular children''s toy to lucrative commissions from a Parisian sybarite for wooden working models with very adult moving parts. Both Roswell and Sarah had lost their spouses and were still grieving in their different ways. And then Christ started putting a hand in - literally - when a fragment of an ancient crucifix fetched up in one of Sarah''s antique lots. Between some compulsion conveyed by this hand and Sarah''s natural urge to make improvements in people, Roswell''s work took a surprising new turn... Russell Hoban''s delicious new novel combines much about art - traditional and conceptual - with new angles on Christ, crash-test dummies, antiques, pornography and a charming tale of romance.

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 on in his head. ''You''re a tiger from the neck up, Professor,'' says Melissa, the brains behind the website, when at last Klein faces the object of his desire. Harold first visits Angelica''s Grotto after losing his ''inner voice'', that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting out the first thing that pops into our heads and finding ourselves in Casualty as a result of it. Harold consults a therapist about this new lack of mental privacy and also has one-to-one onscreen dialogue in the Grotto. ''If I had an inner voice I wouldn''t be telling you all this,'' he explains to the as-yet-unmet Melissa. But when the flesh-and-blood Melissa and her large and well-hung colleague Leslie enter his life he finds it''s good to keep the angina medicine at the ready. Harold Klein''s odyssey takes him not only through erogenous zones but into various corners of the London art world, down the underground and up the buses.

Recently separated Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in Clerkenwell. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which... Navigating several London Underground lines and considerable planetary activity, Russell Hoban''s intriguing romance tangos its way through a world of infidelity, artificial eyeballs, baseball bats and music - never missing a daring, seductive step.

‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.’ Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.

Re-issued to coincide with the centenary of Messiaen''s birth, The Messiaen Companion was the first major study to appear after the composer''s death in April 1992. It was the first book to offer both a complete survey of Messiaen''s extraordinary achievements and a comprehensive guide to his music, also examining in detail the enduring inspiration which Messiaen derived from his religious faith and from his lifelong passion for ornithology and the natural world. The contributors, all of whom have made a special study of the composer, include two biographers of Messiaen and a number of the foremost interpreters of his music. Messiaen''s influential teaching is recalled in essays by three of his pupils (Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, and Peter Hill), and the composer is also remembered in a remarkable and moving contribution from his widow and devoted musical companion, the pianist Yvonne Loriod.

With a new addition to the family, Frances is feeling left out. So Frances decides to run away—but not too far! This new edition of Russell and Lillian Hoban’s beloved classic is perfect for beginning readers.

Frances doesn''t think her little sister, Gloria, can be her friend. But when Frances''s friend Albert has a no-girls baseball game, Frances shows him a thing or two about friendship—and a thing or two about what girls can do. Along the way, Frances discovers that sisters can indeed be friends . . . maybe even best friends.

Frances is a fussy eater. In fact, the only thing she likes is bread and jam. She won''t touch her squishy soft-boiled egg. She trades away her chicken-salad sandwich at lunch. She turns up her nose at boring veal cutlets. Unless Mother can come up with a plan, Frances just might go on eating bread and jam forever!

Falling head over heels for the spirited Lola, who shares his musical tastes and complements him on every level, Max nevertheless pursues a secret second relationship when the unattainable high-school homecoming queen he loved years earlier reenters his life.

In the aquarium at the London Zoo, three sea turtles swim endlessly in ''their little bedsitter of ocean''. Two lonely people, William G and Neaera H, become obsessed with the turtles'' captivity, and resolve to rescue them and release them in to the sea. William''s and Neaera''s diaries tell the story of how they achieve the turtles'' freedom, and in the process re-define their own lives.

Washed up on the beach during a storm, the sea-thing child clings fearfully to the shore until he discovers his true destiny. Suggested level: primary.

A Russell Hoban Omnibus presents four of Hoban''s novels: the haunting The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz; the popular Turtle Diary (which was made into a movie starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley); Pilgermann; and his newest work, Mr Rinyo-Clacton''s Offer, a brilliant Faustian comedy published here for the first time in the United States. Book jacket.

One of a series of early reading books with large print and colour illustrations, this is the story of a dragon who wears wellington boots and the boy who discovers him below a coal-hole marked Ace Dragon Ltd. His exploits include skywriting, flying stunts and turning gold into straw.

After receiving a blow to the head from a bully at school and a mysterious puzzle from a melancholy magician, twelve-year-old Nick enters a strange and frightening reality that changes his life.

La manecilla larga del reloj senala las 12 y la pequena las 7. Es la hora de acostarse de Francisca. Pero antes tiene que beber un vaso de leche y recibir un beso de papa y otro de mama.

When a baby sister arrives, Frances the beloved badger finds a charming way to prove her own importance. Glynis Johns is the perfect voice for Frances.

Preferring her favorite snack to all other foods, Frances is disturbed when her parents agree to give her nothing but bread and jam to eat and eventually discovers the wonderful variety of cuisines that are available.

One day Thelma tricks Frances into buying her old plastic tea set. Thelma says there are no backsies on the bargain. Can Frances come up with a plan that will change her friend''s mind? Outstanding Children''s Books of 1970 (NYT)

The Little Brute Family members eat gravel for breakfast, never say "please" or "thank you" and kick, yell, punch, and shove. But one day everything changes when Baby Brute finds a "lost good feeling" wandering around in a field of daisies and brings it home. Full-color illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.