CHILDREN · FICTION
Val Biro
Balint Stephen Biro (Budapest, October 6, 1921 – July 4, 2014) was a children's author, artist and illustrator. He received his education in Budapest and London. From about 1955 he lived in Chesham, where he helped to found the Chesham Society, and then moved to Amersham about 1971 until 1985.
Once, in the days of good Queen Bess, there was a boy named Jack.
— from Jack and the Beanstalk
Most acclaimed
Jack and the Beanstalk
"Jack McKinney is a bright-eyed twenty-year-old in the business of buying a snapbean farm with forty grand in cash, and attorney Matthew Hope assists with the deal-- until Jack's found dead in his condo, stabbed fourteen times. The backwoods seller wants his forty grand pronto, but nobody can find the cash. And when Matthew pays a visit to the McKinney ranch, he gets more than he bargained for. Jack's mother, Veronica, is a woman who looks half her years, with cool gray eyes to match her ambivalent attitude toward her son's death. The only thing more dangerous than Veronica is daughter Sunny, the mirror image of her mother and a girl who can hold her liquor. Everyone seems to have a theory about the missing money, but Matthew's the only one who can get to the bottom of the bum deal. The fourth installment of Ed McBain's Matthew Hope Mysteries, Jack and the Beanstalk delivers our lawyer into a world of seedy folks, sour deals, and a family gone afoul"--Amazon.com.
The three little pigs
PICTURE BOOKS. Once upon a time there was an old sow who had three little pigs, and as she had not enough for them to eat, she said they had better go out into the world and seek their fortunes. Ages 0+
Arabian Nights
Summary:"A Queer Film Classic on 1974's Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975. Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrative--The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom--as models for his own radical expansion of cinema's capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviours. This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini's late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini's career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez."-- Provided by publisher