The stories in Dolls’ Wedding, by the finest short-story writer in modern Telugu, are nuanced, hard-hitting and marked by the total absence of sentimentality. A tightly constructed plot relies on a minimalist portrayal of characters—among them beggars, peasants, widows, children and the upwardly mobile middle class—whose pragmatism drives them to break convention and fight for their survival. The aged auditor’s young wife in ‘Got to Go to Eluru’ seduces an adolescent boy in order to produce a son who will protect her status when she is widowed; in ‘Firewood’, a peasant girl overcomes fear and speaks out when she is falsely accused of theft. A realist devoid of ideologies, Chaso was deeply interested in the actual life and the inner world of people around him. These luminous translations bring Chaso to a new audience.

This is a captivating collection of short stories by Frances Elizabeth Barrow, a 19th-century American children's writer who wrote under the pen name Aunt Fanny. Contents include: A Letter From Aunt Fanny The Doll's Wedding What Came of Gipsying The Child Heroine Aunt Mary Little Peter The Story Told to Willie

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.

Toys--those celebrated childhood cohorts and lead actors in children's imaginative play--have a fantastic history of heroism in fiction. From teddy bears that guard sleeping babies to plastic soldiers and cowboys who lay siege to wooden block castles, toys are often the heroes of the stories children inspire authors to tell. In this collection of new essays, scholars from a great range of disciplines examine fictional toys as protectors of the children they love, as heroes of their own stories, and as champions for the greater good in the writings of A.A. Milne, Hans Christian Andersen, William Joyce, John Lasseter and many others.

Jenny Wren, The Doll’s Dressmaker, is a welcome contrast to stereotypes of disabled individuals as "permanent children" always in need of protection, "defined by their perceived dependence on the nondisabled" (Klages 2). Far from slinking through life as an object of pity, Jenny proclaims herself "the person of the house". It is a frequent complaint that Dickens's ideal heroine is the angel of the house and that his "stereotypical presentations of angels, fallen sisters, and eccentric women regrettably leave today's readers in search of a viable heroine". While several Dickens’ characters fit binary stereotypes of the disabled as pitiful and helpless, sometimes even monstrous and villainous, Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker, creates a unique and constructive life with regards to her infirmities. She has successfully adaptated her life and in several respects she reverses and challenges and limits usually imposed on disabled women in Victorian fiction. To this end Jenny has built a successful business making dolls clothes for the wealthier members of society. The little dressmaker is so strong and courageous that she physically assaults a vile businessman, Fascination Fledgeby, who has hounded Jenny's friends and ruined many other lives through his extortionate lending practices. Jenny's weapon of choice is pepper, the Victorian girl's counterpart of mace. In a complete reversal of the usual paradigm, the able-bodied man finds himself writhing helplessly, temporarily disabled, humiliated and in pain. Jenny Wren anticipates today's view that the disabled and the able-bodied can work together in interdependent relationships, subverting the expectation that the disabled are inevitably dependent. While typically the disabled woman in the Victorian novel is denied a reproductive future, Jenny is an exception. Dickens was ahead of his time in providing a suitor for Jenny, and envisioning that a disabled woman can be beautiful. With thanks to Sara D. Schotland of Georgetown University and the Disability Studies Quarterly for publishing this summary of Jenny Wren in “The Doll’s Dressmaker.” 10% of the publisher’s profit will be donated to Charities. ------- KEYWORDS/TAGS: YA, Young Adult, story, Victorian, young person, young people, alone, back, bad, beautiful, bench, best, chair, Charles, child, children, children’s story, chin, city, clothes, creature, cry, crutch, dark, dead, Dickens, disabled, disability, , doll, dressmaker, fairy Godmother, Fledgeby, flowers, Jenny Wren, Lizzie, Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie, London, looking, master, miss, money, old, person, pin cushion, pleasant, poor, pretty, queer, quick, Riah, roof, sharp, shook, shop, Sloppy, small, smell, strange, tea, throw, toy, turn, Victorian, voice, Well, white, window, working, yellow, young

A comprehensive collection of supernatural tales drawn from the provinces history, its archives, and its people.

Best-selling author Walter Mosley has selected the year's top fiction from voices well-known and new. Here several authors bring their stories to vivid life for a banner audio edition.