The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.

With his rakish reputation and reluctance to wed, Lord Luke Clarendon is now in need of a make-believe wife. And he's charming enough to convince the talented and beautiful runaway actress Roxanne to play his leading lady. Roxanne's head cautions her against becoming involved with Luke, but it's an offer she can't refuse. As well as offering her financial security, Luke promises to help Roxanne's quest to discover her true identity. Maybe if she's revealed to be highborn, her Lord will claim her as his Lady for real!

Lord Whitney is intelligent, rich, and good looking. But he’s also boring. Despite his notable attributes, he has nothing worthwhile to contribute to the gentlemen he would love to establish friendships with. One thing he’s noticed is that all the gentlemen around him are getting married. So in order to have something in common with them, he does something he never thought he’d do: he lies about being betrothed. His ploy works. For the first time in his life, gentlemen are finally paying attention to him. Soon, however, they start asking him questions about the wonderful lady he’s going to marry. It comes to a point where he can no longer keep up the lie. He has to find a lady to present to them. As fate would have it, Lady Stacey happens to be in the right place at the right time, and he manages to convince her to play along with his scheme. In return for playing the part of his betrothed, he will secure safe passage for her and her mother out of London. But as time passes on, he begins to wonder if there’s more to their ruse than meets the eye. Will their deception bloom into a love that is real, or will it be as make believe as it was when they met?

This story of a stay-at-home mother’s misadventures is “a fun read that ‘imperfect mums’ everywhere will adore” (The Sun). While her husband Matt’s career takes off, Marnie Martin is left with the task of pairing socks and locating Lego. His late nights at the office are turning into late nights who knows where else, and they haven’t had a proper conversation in weeks, sex in months, or a full night’s sleep in years. Marnie’s journalism career has morphed into writing a food column. But even that turns into disaster when Marnie gets distracted by a daydream about her movie-star crush, Maddox Wolfe—which leads to a missed deadline and a case of food poisoning. There’s only one option left for Marnie: blogging. As the anonymous “Mrs Make Believe,” Marnie starts spilling secrets and becomes the voice of messed-up mothers everywhere. But she never could have imagined that her celebrity daydream would walk off the screen and into her reality, turning her already muddled world totally on its head . . . This “compulsively readable and entertaining” novel (Daily Mail) is “a funny, sexy, clever book which brilliantly reflects the chaos of motherhood and marriage” (Alison McGarragh-Murphy, editor of The Motherload). “Funny . . . fabulously fresh and achingly honest . . . I couldn’t put it down.” —Alex Brown, #1 bestselling author of The Secret of Orchard Cottage

In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only countercultural—it threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child's play is—and what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist's office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling's death, expressing feelings they can't express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today's death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

There were Bridgertons before the eight alphabetically named siblings. In this second of the Bridgerton Prequel series, following Because of Miss Bridgerton, we go back to where it all began. . . from #1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn. While you were sleeping... With her brother Thomas injured on the battlefront in the Colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt has two unbearable choices: move in with a maiden aunt or marry a scheming cousin. Instead, she chooses option three and travels across the Atlantic, determined to nurse her brother back to health. But after a week of searching, she finds not her brother but his best friend, the handsome officer Edward Rokesby. He's unconscious and in desperate need of her care, and Cecilia vows that she will save this soldier's life, even if staying by his side means telling one little lie... I told everyone I was your wife When Edward comes to, he's more than a little confused. The blow to his head knocked out three months of his memory, but surely he would recall getting married. He knows who Cecilia Harcourt is—even if he does not recall her face—and with everyone calling her his wife, he decides it must be true, even though he'd always assumed he'd marry his neighbor back in England. If only it were true... Cecilia risks her entire future by giving herself—completely—to the man she loves. But when the truth comes out, Edward may have a few surprises of his own for the new Mrs. Rokesby.

If you think nothing much is going on when Rupert P. Brown III begins sixth grade at Pepperdine Elementary School, you'd be dead wrong. Consider the following: a new teacher with the unlikely name of Miss Blossom; a new principal who has all the girls swooning; a talking bird who thinks he's a math whiz; a computer that goes berserk and produces a Web site called computowitch.com that not only displays some very ominous poetry, but whose password is the name of a witch Rupert has tangled with in the past. Yes, a witch! Faster than you can say "witchcraft and wizardry," Rupert figures he could be in big trouble. He can really use the help of Miss Switch, a real, honest-to-goodness witch herself, who also, amazingly, was once a former popular teacher of Rupert's class at Pepperdine. He has reason to believe she's back, but where? Once again, Rupert records another scary (well, sort of) and funny encounter with Miss Switch. His earlier accounts, equally scary and funny, appear in the books The Trouble with Miss Switch and Miss Switch to the Rescue.

The book, "The Cruise of the Make-Believes" is a novel written by Tom Gallon. "The thin young man with the glossy hat got out of the cab at the end of the street, and looked somewhat distrustfully down that street; glanced with equal distrust at the cabman. A man lounging against the corner public house, as though to keep that British institution from falling, and leaving him without refreshment, got away from it, and inserted himself between the driver and the fare, ready to give information or advice to both, on the strength of being a local resident..." is an excerpt from the first chapter, "The Princess Next Door," of the book.