![]() ![]() This is a familiar device in many folk tales. In the Romanian tale, an underdog hero convinces a dragon of her own considerable might. Julia Donaldson uses the same device of tricking a formidable creature into thinking you’re much stronger than you are. The Gruffalo draws heavily from Alexandra the Rock-eater: An old Rumanian tale, retold by Dorothy Van Woerkom and published in picture book form in 1978. Julia Donaldson is a master at taking old folktales and rewriting them in rhyme for a contemporary audience. ![]() The Gruffalo is an example of mythic structure, which has been super successful as a story structure across cultures for the last 3000 years. Today I take a close look at The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson to show how universal structure exists behind all good stories. It works for picture books, songs, commercials, films and novels. This seven-step structure works for all forms of narrative. This month I’m blogging a series aimed at teaching kids how to structure a story. ![]()
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![]() ![]() He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape. It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. ![]() The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin. In "Maus," Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. ![]() We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. ![]() ![]() ![]() His autobiography, “The Story of My Experiments With Truth.” My Experiments With Truth – Mahatma Gandhi’s Autobiography The most impactful of the literary legacy bequeathed by the Mahatma to the men and women of India must be the story of his own life and his experiments with Truth. The Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad has a rich repository of his writings which includes over 50,000 rare books. ![]() His rich literary legacy ranges from commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita to simple letters written in his own hand that discuss complete truths. His wisdom and depth of understanding of the basic values and principles inherent to Indian culture, come through in his writings. Mahatma Gandhi in his lifetime was a prolific writer.
![]() Thirst isnt necessarily a love story, which I actually like. 1: The Last Vampire, Black Blood, and Red Dice by Christopher Pike 3.85 35,001 Ratings 1,749 Reviews published 1998 26 editions Includes: The Last Vampire Black Blood Red Dice As Want to Read Rate it: Book 4-6 Thirst No. This includes The Last Vampire, Black Blood, and Red Dice. 2: Phantom, Evil Thirst, and Creatures of Forever (Thirst, 2) by Christopher Pike. The Midnight Club also draws from a half dozen of Pike’s earlier works. Presently, The Season of Passage is being adapted as a feature film by Universal Studios while Chain Letter-one of Pike all-time bestselling books-is also being adapted by Hollywood. At the moment, Pike is hard at work on a new YA series. 1 is a compilation of the first three books of Christopher Pikes series, The Last Vampire. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his longtime partner, Abir. Currently, several of Pike’s books are being turned into films and in the fall of 2022, Netflix will be releasing a ten-part series entitled The Midnight Club, based on Pike’s novel of the same name. Christopher Pike is a bestselling young adult novelist and has published several adult books as well- Sati and The Season of Passage being the most popular. In YA, his Last Vampire series-often called Thirst-is a big favorite among his fans. Pike was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Los Angeles. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() With gossip and hostility swirling at school, it’s time to find a cure for his nocturnal condition, and perhaps the one person who can help is his scientist father. Celeste has more to worry about than a secret romance with a hot guy from the wrong side of town. Psychic predictions, generations old secrets, a town divided, and the possibility of falling in love with a hot and heroic werewolf are the perfect formula for what happens… Brandon may be Celeste’s hero, or he may be the most dangerous creature she could encounter in the woods of Legend’s Run. But she can’t deny her attraction or the strong pull he has on her. ![]() Her best friends may never forgive her if she gives up her perfect boyfriend, Nash, for Brandon, who’s from the wrong side of town. But when, after an unnerving visit with a psychic, she encounters a pack of wolves and gorgeous, enigmatic Brandon, she must discover whether his transformation is more than legend or just a trick of the shadows in the moonlight. She’s used to everything in the small town until Brandon Maddox moves to Legend’s Run and Celeste finds herself immediately drawn to the handsome new student. Celeste Parker is used to hearing scary stories about werewolves Legend’s Run is famous for them. ![]() ![]() ![]() The bodies hadn't been buried deeply enough to keep them frozen. A few years ago, a similar enterprise, this time in Spitzbergen, also failed. In the 1950s, the bodies of four flu victims were disinterred from graves in the Alaskan permafrost, but attempts to grow the virus from tissue samples were unsuccessful. ![]() Kolata tells the story of the various attempts to track it down. Influenza viruses weren't identified until 1933, and the nature of the agent that caused the 1918 pandemic has been a mystery until recently. In England and Wales alone, official deaths from influenza numbered 200 000-more than the current annual number of deaths from heart disease. An estimated 25% of the world's population suffered a clinical infection, and global mortality may have been higher than 40 million. It's about the influenza pandemic that gripped the world in 1918, killing more people in a few months than the armies of the first world war slaughtered on the battlefields of Flanders, northern France, and Gallipoli in four years. ![]() ![]() If you think negative strand RNA viruses are giving us a bad time at the moment, read this book to recalibrate your perspective. ![]() ![]() ![]() Lovecraft, Stanley, along with co-writer Scarlett Amaris, have taken the material into a whole other dimension of the bizarre. ![]() ![]() Armed with the original terror tale of the same name by author of nightmares H.P. There is a sublime genius at play in Color Out of Space, and cinematic sorcerer Richard Stanley has conjured another effective and original fright flick to add to his legacy (which includes classics Hardware and Dust Devil). Anyway, that isn’t going great, but things go even less great when a meteor crashes on Nathan’s property and begins having a negative effect on the land and all who live near it, resulting in an existence akin to a blacklight poster from hell… replete with bodies swirled and mangled into near abstraction! ![]() ![]() ![]() When Moore made his debut in the American comics industry in the early ’80s, taking over the little-read Swamp Thing for DC Comics, he instantly made the medium more literary and expressive, injecting it with postmodern techniques that offered a self-awareness and seriousness that previously didn’t exist in the realm of superheroes. ![]() “Whereby,” Moore said, “he was convinced that he was capable of speaking to a range of entities that he had to describe as angels, because describing them as anything else would have probably got him burned.” Behind the couch he was sitting on were reproductions of the Enochian Tables, texts from a 16th century form of magic founded by the occultist John Dee. He was dressed, both times, in a red sweater, and occasionally dragged on an enormous rolled cigarette that smoked up the screen. “No offense, but I am unused to publicizing my own work,” he told me from his home in Northampton, in England’s East Midlands, during one of two Zoom interviews in September, around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. Alan Moore, who is perhaps the greatest comic book writer to ever live, does not give many interviews. ![]() ![]() Eric James Stone’s Nebula-winning novelette, “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” (2010 hereafter, “That Leviathan”), depicts how Harry Malan, president of the tiny Sol branch of the LDS Church, serves Neuter Kimball, an alien convert to the faith many centuries from now. Corey” (the Expanse series) make reference to future Mormons who as a people have maintained faith in the Book of Mormon, temple-building, missionary work, and general cultural status as a “peculiar people” ( King James Version 1 Pet. ![]() Heinlein ( Stranger in a Strange Land “The Menace from Earth”) to the duo called “James S. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints would like to believe their religion would remain vibrant even if their wait for Christ’s Second Coming were prolonged many centuries into the future. ![]() The Translation of a Mormon Alien in “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” ![]() ![]() The Pentecostal Church is really up in there because that thump, the drums, you know. I am reminded of an earlier conversation with local blueswoman Rosalind Wilcox : “Hill country is, like, you on the front porch, the sun is going down, ’til midnight or later hear that thump. I am walking to the Delta Amusement Cafe, a small blues club in the heart of the Alley, where, according to the festival schedule, I am sure to hear some of the region’s best hill country blues. ![]() For the next four days Blues Alley along the downtown square in Clarksdale, Mississippi, will come alive with blues concerts, sidewalk shows, street vendors, and any number of blues jamming sessions. You hear it before you see it, especially on nights like this, which is the first of the Juke Joint Festival. ![]() |