New York Times #1 bestselling author Jeffrey Archer, a master of the short-story form, joins forces with renowned illustrator Paul Cox to re-imagine twenty of his most popular and fêted short stories alongside beautifully rendered watercolor illustrations in The Short, The Long and the Tall. Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to solve a murder and ends up falling in love; and the pretentious schoolboy whose discovery of the origins of his father’s wealth changes his life forever. Revel in the stories of the woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League university during the 1930s, and another young woman who thumbs a lift and has an encounter she will never forget. Discover the haunting story about four men whose characters are tested to the point of death. Finally, a short parable about how pointless war is, and how decent people are caught up in the crossfire of their leaders’ ambitions. This will be a must-buy for dedicated fans of the work of both author and illustrator, and includes the following short stories: Never Stop on the Motorway Cheap at Half the Price Who Killed the Mayor? It Can’t be October Already Stuck on You The Grass is Always Greener The Queen’s Birthday Telegram Clean Sweep Ignatius The First Miracle Caste Off A Wasted Hour Just Good Friends Christina Rosenthal A Gentleman and a Scholar The Road to Damascus Old Love A Good Toss to Lose One Man’s Meat Endgame Confession

Designed with budding readers in mind, each of these tales starring familiar nursery rhyme characters is set in three columns with color-coded type as a script for two voices to read separately and together. By the creators of You Read to Me,

A sixth book in the New York Times bestselling You Read to Me, I'll Read to You series from former children's poet laureate Mary Ann Hoberman, this collection features well-known figures like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. Using traditional reading teaching techniques (alliteration, rhyme, and repetition), this book is perfect for inviting young children to read along with peers or an adult for the first time. With clear, color-coded typography, and sly, lively illustrations, this collection is sure to entertain while encouraging reading skills and interaction with others. Readers will relish these new twists on familiar folklore characters, including Johnny Appleseed, Annie Oakley, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and many more!

"A Tall Tale About The Dog With The Polka Dotted Tail" is a cute and lovable story about an outcast dog, with a most unusual tail, who learns that he is perfect just the way he is.

In basketball, just as in American culture, the 1970s were imperfect. But it was a vitally important time in the development of the nation and of the National Basketball Association. During this decade Americans suffered through the war in Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate cover-up (not to mention disco music and leisure suits) while the NBA weathered the arrival of free agency and charges that its players were “too black.” Despite this turmoil, or perhaps because of it, the NBA evolved into a cultural phenomenon. Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and the Birth of the Modern NBA traces the evolution of the NBA from the retirement of Bill Russell in 1969 to the arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson ten years later. Sandwiched between the youthful league of the sixties and its mature successor in the eighties, this book reveals the awkward teenage years of the NBA in the seventies. It examines the many controversies that plagued the league during this time, including illicit drug use, on-court violence, and escalating player salaries. Yet even as attendance dwindled and networks relegated playoff games to tape-delayed, late-night broadcasts, fans still pulled on floppy gray socks like “Pistol Pete” Maravich, emulated Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s sweeping skyhook, and grew out mushrooming afros à la “Dr. J” Julius Erving. The first book-length treatment of pro basketball in the 1970s, Tall Tales and Short Shorts brings to life the players, teams, and the league as a whole as they dealt with expansion, a merger with the ABA, and transitioning into a new era. Sport historians and basketball fans will enjoy this entertaining and enlightening survey of an often-overlooked time in the development of the NBA.

The Kid Looks Back is a collection of sixty-eight stories that cover a wide range of topics. I hope that his book will be a gentle hiding place where you can go to get away from something, return to something or go where you have never been. Some of these stories are true. Others are factually true, although bit embellished. Others are outright fabrications. Most look back to a kinder, mellower time. Digging for worms, swimming in a pond, using an outhouse or wading in a river may bring gross evaluations from our urbanized cousins. I hope that this book introduces them to life with a smile. Most of the stories have a message. Many are simply humorous. Entertainment is the motive. Carefree is the mood. Try to find yourself within these pages. May the beak of reality crack your comfort shell. Start anywhere. Finish anytime. Enjoy!

The perfect addition to every family’s home library and just right for sharing aloud, American Tall Tales introduces readers to America’s first folk heroes in nine wildly exaggerated and downright funny stories. Here are Paul Bunyan, that king-sized lumberjack who could fell “ten white pines with a single swing”; John Henry, with his mighty hammer; Mose, old New York’s biggest, bravest fireman; Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, who could “outgrin, outsnort, outrun, outlift, outsneeze, outsleep, outlie any varmint”; and other uniquely American characters, together in one superb collection. In the tradition of the original nineteenth-century storytellers, Mary Pope Osborne compiles, edits, and adds her own two cents’ worth—and also supplies fascinating historical headnotes. Michael McCurdy’s robust colored wood engravings recall an earlier time, perfectly capturing all the vitality of the men and women who carved a new country out of the North American wilderness.

Tall Tales of a Short Clown is the story of Barry Lubin, whose alter ego, Grandma, became one of the most successful clowns in American history, and was named "The World's Funniest Grandma" in Germany. Barry has entertained well over a hundred million people in circus rings, stadiums, arenas, on stage, in festivals, in films, and on television as the funny little carpetbagger with a mischievous view of the world. Barry is undoubtedly the only person to have achieved the combination of performing a running headstand onto a whoopee cushion on stage at Carnegie Hall, eating well over 10,000 bagels, and managing to piss off Ringo Starr, Meryl Streep, Gene Kelly, and Bruce Springstein as well as being inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame. Tall Tales of a Short Clown follows Barry's journey from Emerson College dropout to Clown College graduate, from his early failures on the Greatest Show on Earth to his induction into the Ring of Fame, the highest honor in clowning and in circus. He reveals his struggles with drug abuse and alcoholism and his journey into sobriety, his bout with thyroid cancer and his triumphant return to the ring, and his love affair with audiences on six continents over five decades, to earn his place as one of the most beloved clowns in history.

And that is exactly what this book is: a varied collection of short stories from the acknowledged British master of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Brian Lumley, in a single volume of all three domains of the imagination – but more especially the haunts of the sinister and macabre! Inspired by the weird tales of the great Edgar Allan Poe, and as some readers might reasonably insist, the even greater H. P. Lovecraft – himself an admirer of Poe – here is a host of rather more modern witcheries from times since the sad demise of many such old masters, based on eras long forgotten before all such tale-tellers so much as existed; concepts spawned in an immemorial past that even now continues to provide the source and fundamentals of similar conceits, such as they were, in the shape of folk legends and the frequently monstrous cautions of so-called “fairy tales,” in modes made their own by the antique yarns of the Brother’s Grimm, now sadly long-demised – a fact which in itself says a lot for the longevity of these genres! Stories included in this collection: The Man in the Dream Late Shopping Spider in the Bath Memory? The Lecture Hell Is a Personal Place Problem Child The Sorceror's Dream Mother Love Not a Creature Was Stirring In the Glow Zone Little Man Lost Snarker's Son What Dark God? The Strange Years The Man Who Saw No Spiders Swamped A Really Game Boy A Dreamer's Tale In Dublin's Fair City As well as three short stories in just fifty words each and four favourite poems from "Ghoul Warning"