I’m looking for a children’s book of short stories I received as a gift in the 80s. I think the front cover had a photo of an eagle with people standing on it. It may have been a blue cover.
I do remember one of the short stories was about two sisters in a fight. The younger sister accidentally drew a pen mark on her older sister’s David Lee Roth poster and when she tried to erase it she rubbed a hole through.
I am looking for a fairytale collection that I remember from my youth. My mom bought them for us in the 1950s and my stepmother has thrown them out. Sorry, I do not have the title. Here is what I remember: There was a set of three books. The cover was hard-bound and cream-colored. Each book had a small colored panel on the spine. One green, one red and one brown. I recall that they contained “The Princess and the Pea”, “Rapunzel” and “Rutabaga Tale” I would love to buy these treasured tomes if anyone has them.
I am looking for a book from my childhood and I’m hoping you can help me. It is a children’s book of short stories/folktales/fables, all of which were set in Africa. Each story was different and had different characters. It was written in English, but all of the characters had African names. I think there were around 20 different stories.
It was a large, hardcover book, maybe 15-18 inches tall by 8-10 inches wide. The cover definitely had orange on it. I think it also had brown and dark green. I also am pretty sure that there were vertical stripes on the cover. I think the book had around 80-100 pages, but that number could be way off.
My mom read it to me in the mid to late 1990s, and it was probably purchased from a Scholastic book fair, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
I read the book in the late ’90s? I had to have been in the 5th grade. I read a lot of paranormal books around that time! The book itself might have been a collection of ghost stories. I don’t think it was “Stories to Tell in the Dark,” but I could be wrong. All I know is that this particular story stuck with me for over twenty-five years.
A family moves into a house with their daughter. Could be just a single mom. The house was purchased after the woman who lived in it before passed. Soon after they move in the daughter starts having nightmares or is getting sick. She starts to talk about the ghost of a girl.
A medium is eventually called in and he holds a seance. The ghost’s name is Sarah (or Sara) and he asks that she knock to answer questions. Eventually, it is discovered that she is in on the property. With the knocks, she leads them to her resting place. “Keep Knocking Sarah!” or “Lead us to you Sarah!” is shouted by the medium. Her coffin is found behind the wall of the closet or the wall of the girl’s bedroom. Sarah is moved and buried next to her mother.
Looking for metafictional short story that’s an homage to classic noir (probably published in the last 10 years or so) in which a PI is hired by a pulp fiction publisher to write stories. I think the PI only deals with a woman (secretary?) at first, they pay him a lot of money for his writing, and then maybe he eventually meets the publisher and there’s a twist ending that goes poorly for the PI. The tone was winkingly hardboiled (first-person narrator like classic PI stories). I have exhausted every possible Google keyword variation I can think of, and am just hoping someone in your network may have read this! I seem to think it was in a short story collection with different authors doing takes on mystery stories (similar to an anthology called Tiny Crimes), but could be wrong about that.
1. No Title (the cover is missing
2. Book is about 100 pages +/-; Chapters are individual stories with a moral such as: Page 17, The Storm, Page 2, The Burglar; Page 71, The Letter to Mama, etc.; also includes black/white photography of animals, children, people, scenes with captions & guessing the “origin” such as “@ Topical” or H.A. Roberts titled “It’s Lots of Fun Helping Daddy” page 64; or Page 58 Gendreau “Feeding the Horse”;
3. There were at least 1 or 2 others books very similar to the above. Our mom would read a story at nap time or bedtime in the 1940s-1950s; The books we had were soft-back.
This was a large, hardcover book of bedtime stories for children. It was red with gold page edging. One of the stories in it was about a baker who forgot his glasses. He mixed up his ingredients and made raisin cookies and chocolate chip bread instead of raisin bread and chocolate chip cookies. Then, while making a birthday cake for his niece, he is unable to read the recipe properly because he lost his glasses. So instead of using 2 cups of flour, he uses two crates. And instead of 2 eggs, he uses two dozen eggs. Then he presents this ginormous cake to his niece, who loves it, and lets him know she found his glasses. I believe it was called The Birthday Cake Mix-up or something like that. The characters in most of the stories in this collection are bugs of some sort. Another story is about a little girl trying to get her hair done but she doesn’t like any of the styles the hairdresser makes. Eventually the hairdresser asks her what hairstyle she wants and she says she wants pony tails but her mom says they aren’t fancy enough. So the hairdresser makes her fancy pony tails with ribbons and curls, and she is happy.
Farmer’s wife shrinks suddenly, unexpectedly, and often. At a store, she shrinks and falls into an open bin of dry macaroni. The farmer hears only “macaroni, macaroni!” as her tiny voice cries out. Another instance has her riding on the back of a crow. This could possibly be a stand-alone book, or it could be a story in a storybook collection.