The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms


Book Description

Whimsical and revolutionary poems and art by some of Russia's foremost avant-garde writers and illustrators A boy wants a toy horse big enough to ride, but where can his father find it? Not in the stores, which means it’s got to be built from scratch. How? With the help of expert workers, from the carpenter to the painter, working together as one. And now the bold boy is ready to ride off in defense of the future! Two trams, Click and Zam, are cousins. Click goes out for a day on the tracks and before long he’s so tired he doesn’t know where he is or how to get back. All he knows is he’s got to find Zam. Click is looking for Zam and Zam is looking for Click, and though for a while it seems like nobody knows where to find Click, good and faithful Zam is not to be deterred. Peter’s a car, Vasco’s a steamboat, and Mikey’s a plane. They’re all running like mad and going great guns until, whoops, there’s a big old cow, just a plain old cow, standing in the road. What then? The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature. The Fire Horse brings together three classics from the era in which some of Russia’s most celebrated poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms, teamed up with some of its finest artists, Lidia Popova, Boris Ender, and Vladimir Konashevich. Brilliantly translated by the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, this is poetry that is as whimsical and wonderful as it is revolutionary.




The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms


Book Description

Whimsical and revolutionary poems and art by some of Russia's foremost avant-garde writers and illustrators A boy wants a toy horse big enough to ride, but where can his father find it? Not in the stores, which means it’s got to be built from scratch. How? With the help of expert workers, from the carpenter to the painter, working together as one. And now the bold boy is ready to ride off in defense of the future! Two trams, Click and Zam, are cousins. Click goes out for a day on the tracks and before long he’s so tired he doesn’t know where he is or how to get back. All he knows is he’s got to find Zam. Click is looking for Zam and Zam is looking for Click, and though for a while it seems like nobody knows where to find Click, good and faithful Zam is not to be deterred. Peter’s a car, Vasco’s a steamboat, and Mikey’s a plane. They’re all running like mad and going great guns until, whoops, there’s a big old cow, just a plain old cow, standing in the road. What then? The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature. The Fire Horse brings together three classics from the era in which some of Russia’s most celebrated poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms, teamed up with some of its finest artists, Lidia Popova, Boris Ender, and Vladimir Konashevich. Brilliantly translated by the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, this is poetry that is as whimsical and wonderful as it is revolutionary.




A Companion to Soviet Children's Literature and Film


Book Description

A Companion to Soviet Children’s Literature and Film offers a comprehensive and innovative analysis of Soviet literary and cinematic production for children. Its contributors contextualize and reevaluate Soviet children’s books, films, and animation and explore their contemporary re-appropriation by the Russian government, cultural practitioners, and educators. Celebrating the centennial of Soviet children’s literature and film, the Companion reviews the rich and dramatic history of the canon. It also provides an insight into the close ties between Soviet children’s culture and Avant-Garde aesthetics, investigates early pedagogical experiments of the Soviet state, documents the importance of translation in children’s literature of the 1920-80s, and traces the evolution of heroic, fantastic, historical, and absurdist Soviet narratives for children.




The Doorman's Repose


Book Description

From Caldecott Award winner Chris Raschka, tales of unforgettable characters who live in a NYC apartment building “To the company of ur-New Yorkers like Stuart Little, Harriet the Spy, and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, let me hold open the door for The Doorman’s Repose. A new favorite." —Gregory Maguire “….marvelously intriguing stories…” —Lemony Snicket Some of us look up at those craggy, mysterious apartment buildings found in the posher parts of New York City and wonder what goes on inside. The Doorman’s Repose collects ten stories about 777 Garden Avenue, one of the craggiest. The first story recounts the travails of the new doorman, who excels at all his tasks except perhaps the most important one—talking baseball. Others tell of a long-forgotten room, a cupid-like elevator, and the unlikely romance of a cerebral psychologist and a jazz musician, both of whom are mice. Because the animals talk and the machinery has feelings, these are children’s stories. Otherwise they are for anyone intrigued by what happens when many people, strangers or kin, live together under one roof.




Jim at the Corner


Book Description

These seafaring tales begin on a street corner where Jim, a retired sailor, spends his days, passing the time telling a curious boy named Derry about life aboard his ship, the Rockinghorse. In the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, Farjeon’s tales of talking sea serpents and stew-eating chimpanzees bring the far near and turn ordinary weather into an astronomical adventure. With pen-and-ink illustrations by the maritime master artist Edward Ardizzone, Jim at the Corner is an old-fashioned adventure for the eyes and the ears.




The Pushcart War


Book Description

"The best book about politics ever written for children." —The Washington Post 50th Anniversary Edition, now in paperback DO YOU KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE PUSHCART WAR? THE REAL HISTORY? It’s a story of how regular people banded together and, armed with little more than their brains and good aim, defeated a mighty foe. Not long ago the streets of New York City were smelly, smoggy, sooty, and loud. There were so many trucks making deliveries that it might take an hour for a car to travel a few blocks. People blamed the truck owners and the truck owners blamed the little wooden pushcarts that traveled the city selling everything from flowers to hot dogs. Behind closed doors the truck owners declared war on the pushcart peddlers. Carts were smashed from Chinatown to Chelsea. The peddlers didn’t have money or the mayor on their side, but that didn’t stop them from fighting back. They used pea shooters to blow tacks into the tires of trucks, they outwitted the police, and they marched right up to the grilles of those giant trucks and dared them to drive down their streets. Today, thanks to the ingenuity of the pushcart peddlers, the streets belong to the people—and to the pushcarts. The Pushcart War was first published more than fifty years ago. It has inspired generations of children and been adapted for television, radio, and the stage around the world. It was included on School Library Journal’s list of One Hundred Books That Shaped the Twentieth Century, and its assertion that a committed group of men and women can prevail against a powerful force is as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in 1964.




Everything Under a Mushroom


Book Description

This whimsical classic is a perfect read-aloud book for kids ages 3–7, with charmingly silly rhymes that will inspire giggles and out-of-the-box thinking. The celebrated author of The Carrot Seed reveals a tiny world where big imaginations roam free...all under a mushroom. If children were small enough to fit under a mushroom, what would they do? Everything and anything that’s fun to do! This delightfully whimsical book about a tiny under-a-mushroom world is full of fanciful goings-on as the little inhabitants let their imaginations soar. Rhyming words on every page suggest the games they play. They smile and laugh and pretend they are cows… They set up a little town, complete with a pizza stand… They watch the moon come up and pretend they are little stars… They become flowers in a garden who greet a beautiful morning. It’s all wonderful nonsense, and just the kind of “let’s pretend” fun that appeals to kids. Even the tiniest readers (and listeners) will be enchanted with this very special world.




Silver


Book Description

Slowly, silently, now the moonWalks the night in her silver shoon;This way, and that, she peers, and seesSilver fruit upon silver trees; One spring evening, the fairies gather in the woods. Two sleepy children join in the parade to a wonderful, dream-like fairy party. Illustrated by bright new talent, Carolina Rabei, this Walter de la Mare poem is brought to life with shimmery, ethereal illustrations, making it the perfect book for bedtime. One of four seasonal Walter de la Mare picture books that form a set, each with complementing colour palates and illustrations by rising young star Carolina.




Pedagogy of Images


Book Description

This collection offers a variety of scholarly views on illustrated books for Soviet children, covering everything from artistic innovation to state propaganda.




The Firebird and the Fox


Book Description

A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.