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.

When a baby sister arrives, Frances the badger finds a charming way to prove her own importance.

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.

Frances doesn't think her younger sister Gloria can be her friend. Gloria is too small to throw or catch a ball. Besides, Albert is Frances's friend. But when Albert has a no-girls baseball game, Frances sets out to prove to Albert a thing or two about friendship—and a thing or two about what girls can do. Along the way, Frances discovers that sisters can indeed be friends . . . maybe even best friends. Now reillustrated in lovely soft pastels by original artist Lillian Hoban, this satisfying story of friendship is sure to have the many fans of this irresponsible badger cheering once again.

Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking turtle thoughts. As they come together to hatch a plan to release the turtles into the sea, their diaries reveal how they find their own lives changing in imperceptible and quite unintended ways.

This masterpiece of 20th-century literature offers readers both a chance to revisit a classic and discover new insights through additional material by the author. The book delves into profound themes and showcases the author's unique narrative style, enriching the reading experience for both newcomers and returning fans.

"There is," said the marzipan pig, "such sweetness in me!" From the inimitable team of Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, the pair behind Captain Najork and The Twenty Elephant Restaurant, comes an enchanting story of a little pig made of marzipan. Fallen behind the sofa, nobody hears the lost marzipan pig's cries for help. And, after many months, a mouse discovers him and eats him up, having never known such sweetness. But a longing to be loved passes from the marzipan pig to the mouse ... and so begins a curious chain of events featuring a dancing owl, a glowing taxi meter, a buzzing bee and a pinky-orange hibiscus flower - all triggered by the little lost marzipan pig. Each encounter more wonderful and more romantic than the last, just how far will the marzipan's sweetness travel?

On 4 November 2052 Fremder Gorm is found drifting in space a few megaklicks off Badu, a planet in the Fourth Galaxy. He is the only survivor from "Clever Daughter", a battered old tanker. Why did Fremder survive?

'Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.' Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.

Kleinzeit. In German, that means "hero." Or "smalltime." It depends on whom you ask.On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later, he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery...

It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

The map-maker lives in a time when lions are extinct. He makes a map for his son to find everything he could ever want, but suddenly deserts his family to look for a lion. His son, pursuing him, finds a great deal more than just his father. The author also wrote "Turtle Diary" and "Pilgerman".

Two discarded toy mice survive perilous adventures in a hostile world before finding security and happiness with old friends and new.

In Ariosto's epic 16th-century poem "Orlando Furioso", the beautiful Angelica , chained, naked, to a rock and menaced by a sea monster is rescued by the valiant Ruggiero, riding a 'hippogriff', the offspring of a griffin and a mare - an entirely imaginary winged creature (as readers of "Harry Potter" know). Volatore, as this hippogriff calls himself, has escaped the poem in which he has been confined for centuries and is determined to find his Angelica, even if it takes him to the 21st century and involves some shape-shifting. He lands in contemporary San Francisco and the first person he sets eyes on is Angelica Greenberg, the Jewish owner of a San Franciscan art gallery, who has just dumped her fiance. Volatore rises to her window and they hit it off big-time. But no sooner have they met and fallen in love than events conspire to separate the two so that Volatore must not only seek Angelica but also find the perfect form in which to consummate his undying love. The first is too masculine, the second not enough so, but will the third be just right, and how will Angelica reconcile the imaginary and the real in the perfect lover? "Angelica Lost and Found" contains the familiar drollery, the marvellous turn of phrase, the aesthetic insights and the romance of Russell Hoban, but it also contains a lively, life-enhancing wisdom that is all of its own.

Roswell Clark's life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed to get an optimistic-looking bat tattoo on his shoulder. His ideal bat image was featured on an 18th century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat. What did it mean? Sarah dealt in antiques and Roswell soon ran into her stalls in Chelsea and Covent Garden. His calling, which grew out of an obsession with crash-test dummies, was a bit harder to explain. It led from the invention of a popular children's toy to lucrative commissions from a Parisian sybarite for wooden working models with very adult moving parts. Both Roswell and Sarah had lost their spouses and were still grieving in their different ways. And then Christ started putting a hand in - not in the 'born again' sense, but literally - a hand, a fragment of an ancient crucifix that fetched up in one of Sarah's antique lots. Between some compulsion conveyed by this hand and Sarah's natural urge to make improvements in people, Roswell's work took a surprising new turn. Russell Hoban's delicious new novel combines much about art - traditional and conceptual - with new angles on Christ, crash-test dummies, antiques and pornography - a pleasure on every page and as mysterious and uplifting as bat wings.

Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Sixteen-Face John, a shaman, learns that his first child, a soonchild, cannot hear the World Songs from her mother's womb. The World Songs are what inspire all newborns to come out into the world, and John must find them for her. But how? The answer takes him through many lifetimes and many shape-shifts, as well as encounters with beasts, demons and a mysterious benevolent owl spirit, Ukpika, who is linked to John's past...Legendary storyteller, Russell Hoban whisks his readers across frozen landscapes, to the edges of cliffs, into tiny rocky crannies, and down into the belly of a great swallowing demon - and has them laughing and weeping by turns along the way. Lyrical illustrator, Alexis Deacon meets the spirit of Hoban's vision head-on, and brilliantly captures the dark magic that lies at the heart of this fable. This book is jacketed.

New novel by prolific British novelist Russell Hoban

The startling novel by one of the most original writers of the twentieth century.

From renowned picture book creators Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, the story of Ace Dragon LTD. — who isn’t so limited after all. When John notices a manhole cover with the words ACE DRAGON LTD. written across it, he can't help but investigate what lies beneath. And so begins an unusual friendship between a boy and a dragon named Ace, who wears two pairs of Wellington boots and loves skywriting with fire, flying stunts to the moon, and turning gold into straw. With so many talents, John wonders if, unlike his moniker, Ace really isn't so limited after all!

An inexplicable message flashed onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him ‘to those places in your head that you can't get to on your own' - and plunges him into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

When Irving Goodman falls in love with Justine Trimble he is close to the end of his life and she's been dead for forty-seven years. Irving doesn't know how he's going to attain his heart's desire but he knows a man who does. Justine was a star of 1950s black-and-white westerns, an expert horsewoman much admired for her seat, and when Istvan Fallok, a wizard of high technology, sees her in Irving's video of Last Stage to El Paso, he hi-techs Justine out of the videotape and into present-day Soho - in black-and-white. It's amazing what you can do with magnetised particles in a suspension of disbelief. As any reader of Bram Stoker will know, blood is the (full-colour) life. Istvan is Justine's first donor but in order not to be walking around in black-and-white, she has to be topped up now and then by Irving and his friends and the odd passer-by. Not surprisingly, the curiosity of the police is soon aroused. Things become a little complicated when Grace Kowalski brings a Justine Two into the picture. Where will this all end? Linger Awhileand find out.

John loves to draw all kinds of monsters. His parents are concerned with his interest in monsters so John, drawing in hand, goes to see Dr. Plumber--who discovers just how realistic John's drawings really are! A charming picture book that adds a refreshing sense of humor to the popular subject of monsters.

Der Kartenmacher - bk1189; Rowohlt Verlag; Russell Hoban; pocket_book; 1989

"Hoban ist ein Genie."The Guardian§§Peter Diggs, ein Londoner Maler, steht zwischen zwei Frauen: fordernd und dunkel die eine, Leonore, zart und elfengleich entrückt die andere, die den beziehungsreichen Namen Amaryllis trägt. Amaryllis verfügt über die Gabe, ihn in ihre Träume hineinzuziehen, in denen dann manchmal die wundersamsten Dinge geschehen. Die Konturen zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit verschwimmen - wo fängt das eine an und hört das andere auf? Hat sie ihn nun in seinem Atelier besucht? Haben sie dort die schönsten Dinge miteinander getrieben? Hat sie ihn, hat er sie geträumt? Gibt es eine Garantie für die Wirklichkeit? Und was hat Leonore mit all dem zu schaffen?

Ein poetisches Buch über die ersten Schritte auf dem eigenen Weg. „P“ Stürmisch ist die Nacht, als der Wind das kleine Meerwesen aus seinem Nest schleudert. Noch zu klein zum Schwimmen oder Fliegen, richtet es sich verängstigt in einem Iglu aus Muscheln und Steinen am Strand ein. Doch es ist nicht allein: Das kleine Meerwesen findet in der Winkerkrabbe eine Freundin und gemeinsam lernen sie, ihre Ängste zu überwinden und auf die eigenen Fähigkeiten zu vertrauen. Am Ende jedoch heißt es für die beiden Abschied nehmen. Denn durch seine Gespräche mit einem Seeaal und einem Albatros hat das kleine Meerwesen erkannt, dass es selbst ein Kind der Lüfte und des Ozeans und, im Gegensatz zu seiner Freundin der Winkerkrabbe, nicht für ein Leben an Land geschaffen ist.