Russell Hoban Books

s her little sister Gloria's birthday approaches, Frances wavers between being generous'and being jealous. ‘[Frances] is every youngster who chafes at being the un-birthday child.

A classic tale of the triumph of fooling-around fun over humourless no-nonsense adult disapproval! Tom loves to fool around. He fools around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and he fools around with barrels in alleys. He fools around so much that his maiden aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong (who wears an iron hat and takes no nonsense from anyone), sends for Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach Tom a lesson. Captain Najork, says Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, is seven feet tall, with eyes like fire and a voice like thunder. He teaches fooling-around boys the lesson they so badly need, and it is not one that they soon forget. Captain Najork lays down a challenge: they will play womble, muck and speedball - in that order. And it turns out not to be Tom who gets taught a lesson after all!

Another classic from Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, featuring a jam-powered frog and an eccentric headmistress ... as nutty and compulsive as ever.

By the author of The Mouse and his Child. Nick can't resist the idea of exploring the world inside the Moe Nagic's puzzle and the track that leads to Trokeville. In this strange world, he suffers pangs of love for Cynthia and gets entangled in Moe's past before finding his way back to reality.

Famed for her many adventures, Frances made her debut with this title over thirty years ago. In this first Frances book, the little badger adroitly delays her bedtime with requests for kisses and milk, and concerns over tigers and giants and things going bump in the night. Long a favorite for the gentle humor of its familiar going to bed ritual, Bedtime for Frances is at last available with the warmth of full color enriching Garth Williams' s original nuanced and touching art. ' Here is the coziest, most beguiling bedtime story in many a day.' -- Kirkus Reviews (pointer).

This is a collection of stories, a libretto, essays and sketches about knife-fights, a stone sphinx in Paris, a painter in Venice, an opera libretto which re-invents Miranda and Caliban and essays that discuss, among other things, fairy tales and Russell Hoban's own childhood in America.

Thelma usually outsmarts Frances until Frances decides to teach her a lesson about friendship.

Feeling overlooked with the arrival of a new baby sister, Frances grapples with her emotions as her parents seem preoccupied. Frustrated by small grievances, she decides to run away, though her adventure is short-lived. This heartwarming story explores themes of family dynamics and the challenges of sibling rivalry, making it a delightful read for young audiences. The new edition of this classic tale captures the essence of childhood feelings and the importance of love and understanding within a family.

Frances is a fussy eater. In fact, the only thing she likes is bread and jam. She won't touch her squishy soft-boiled egg. She trades away her chicken-salad sandwich at lunch. She turns up her nose at boring veal cutlets. Unless Mother can come up with a plan, Frances just might go on eating bread and jam forever!

'This is it … this is my destiny woman,' Max blurted out when he first met Lola Blessington at the Coliseum shop. Not only was Lola aristocratic and wild at heart, but the two had discovered an uncanny convergence of musical tastes. Soon they were converging at every level - Lola filling Max's emptiness and vice versa. But Max had also always craved the recognition of another sort of woman, the sort who had been Homecoming Queen at her high school - just as the tempting Lula Mae Flowers had been back in Texas. Why did Max have to meet Lula Mae just when he'd found his destiny woman in Lola? And what everyone wanted to know was this: if Lola embodied everything Max longed for, how could there be anything left over for Texan ex-Homecoming Queens? Russell Hoban's hero is a man with a lot of remembering to do once Lola takes revenge by composing a raga of forgetfulness (and this is not something to try at home). In fact Max finds himself in a general quest for the beginnings of things - like a page one for either of the two books he is trying to write, or an answer to why his childhood memories always link Noah's ark with the back of his grandfather's boiler.