Russell Hoban - Böcker

In The Lobster's Birthday and Other Stories, discover what happens when you wake up thirsty in the middle of the night. How do you play a trick on the most insufferable boy in the village, while helping out Aunt Arabelle at the same time? What would you do on your birthday if you were a lobster? Find out when you join Harriet, Just William, and Harold and Gloria in this comical collection of short stories.Chucklers is a series of funny novels, short stories, anthologies and comics that make reading a pleasure for 7-11 year olds. There is something for everyone in this varied collection which is packed with fantastic illustrations.Books contain inside cover notes to support children in their reading. Help with children's reading development also available at www.oxfordowl.co.uk.The series is written by top children's authors and edited by award-winning author Jeremy Strong. The books are finely levelled, making it easy to match every child to the right book.

'Recalls Orwell's 1984 and Wells's The Time Machine ... a revelation' GuardianOn 4 November 2052, Fremder Gorn is discovered drifting in deep space. He has no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen, but he is still alive: the sole survivor from the mysteriously vanished ship Clever Daughter. How did he get here? To find out, Fremder must search through memory, dream and the unknowable fragments of his own mind. 'A wildly imaginative piece of science fiction' The Times'Unputdownable, moving, ingenious ... it will remain in my head with troubling images and scenes for a long time' A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard

'An original ... a delight to read' The TimesOn an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death.'Kleinzeit, is a sort of holy fool, a fierce, lonely intelligence desperately trying to make sense of a hopeless world. A tour de force ... entirely delightful' Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard

'A piece of invention as original as any of Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis's' New Statesman'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.'Magic at work ... Funny as well as beautiful' Irish Times'Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. His narrative is so minutely and compellingly realistic that after a time you cease to notice that he has stood reality on its head' Sunday Times

'Sparkles with classical allusions and a wisecracking humour ... it is pure joy' Daily TelegraphIt all begins the night a leaflet comes through the door of unsuccessful novelist Herman Orff, promising a magical cure for writer's block. The strange treatment plunges him into a hallucinatory London dreamworld populated by figures mythical and real: a severed talking head, Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring, his lost love Luise and, beneath it all, the Kraken awaiting. As Herman will discover, creating art is a tough business.'One of his most accessibly entertaining books' The Times'Short, smart and fizzy, the novel seeks out the roots of creativity with none of the solemnity that phrase implies' New Statesman

'Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple' GuardianIt 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.'A dark treatise on the mysterious nature of things ... The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch, pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel' The New York Times Book Review'A strange and beautiful work' Evening Standard

'This is what literature is meant to be' Anthony Burgess'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.'Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece' Observer'A timeless portrayal of the human condition ... frightening and uncanny' Will Self'A book that I could read every day forever and still be finding things' Max Porter

'Wonderful, life-saving ... places Russell Hoban among the greatest, timeless novelists' The TimesBorn 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.'Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony' Time'This lovely human fable seems to me one of the best things of its kind - a fine and touching achievement' John Fowles

"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy...Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and-this matters most-intensely ponderable." -Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." -Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style...The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." -Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary...Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." -Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." -John Leonard, The New York Times "Highly enjoyable...An intriguing plot...Ferociously inventive." -Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Astounding...Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." -Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan "An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.'-Paul Gray, Time Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state-and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture-rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.

Re-issued to coincide with the centenary of Messiaen's birth, The Messiaen Companion was the first major study to appear after the composer's death in April 1992. It was the first book to offer both a complete survey of Messiaen's extraordinary achievements and a comprehensive guide to his music, also examining in detail the enduring inspiration which Messiaen derived from his religious faith and from his lifelong passion for ornithology and the natural world. The contributors, all of whom have made a special study of the composer, include two biographers of Messiaen and a number of the foremost interpreters of his music. Messiaen's influential teaching is recalled in essays by three of his pupils (Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, and Peter Hill), and the composer is also remembered in a remarkable and moving contribution from his widow and devoted musical companion, the pianist Yvonne Loriod.

Funny, thought-provoking and moving, this much loved story is a true classic.'What are we, Papa?' the toy mouse child asked his father. 'I don't know,' the father answered. 'We must wait and see.'So begins the story of a tin father and son who dance under a Christmas tree until they break the ancient clockwork rules and are themselves broken. Thrown away, then rescued from a dustbin and repaired by a tramp, they set out on a dangerous quest for a family and a place of their own - the magnificent doll's house, the plush elephant and the tin seal they had once know in the toy shop.'Hugely funny, provocative, pathetic and heroic.' TLS'Brilliantly plotted . . . a spellbinder . . . it has a style that glows and crackles.' Spectator

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which seventy-two-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities, known to medical consultants as 'he who declines to hop the twig', may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going on in his head. 'You're a tiger from the neck up, Professor,' says Melissa, the brains behind the website, when at last Klein faces the object of his desire. Harold first visits Angelica's Grotto after losing his 'inner voice', that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting out the first thing that pops into our heads and finding ourselves in Casualty as a result of it. Harold consults a therapist about this new lack of mental privacy and also has one-to-one onscreen dialogue in the Grotto. 'If I had an inner voice I wouldn't be telling you all this,' he explains to the as-yet-unmet Melissa. But when the flesh-and-blood Melissa and her large and well-hung colleague Leslie enter his life he finds it's good to keep the angina medicine at the ready.Harold Klein's odyssey takes him not only through erogenous zones but into various corners of the London art world, down the underground and up the buses.

The first time Peter Diggs saw Amaryllis she was at a bus stop where the street sign said Balsamic, although there was nothing vinegary about the place. The bus was unthinkably tall, made of yellow, orange and pink rice paper, lit from within like a Japanese lantern. That was a dream, but where this romance goes as the dream begins to intersect reality is nothing that a reader can be prepared for. 'Trust me, I'm a weirdo,' says Amaryllis as she and Peter embark on their nocturnal experimentation, which leaves no one, on quite the same footing with reality.

Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell Clark's life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an eighteenth-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 - literally - when a fragment of an ancient crucifix 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, pornography and a charming tale of romance.

Since the age of thirteen, Christabel Alderton has been troubled by a sort of second sight that works sometimes, but not always. Death is much on her mind because the men in her life tend to die before their time and she's come to think she's bad luck. Fascinated by Christabel, diabetologist Elias Newman is keen to know her better but she's afraid of what might happen. Taking the reader from the River Lea via a haunted woodland bog, out to the crash of the Pacific surf on Kahakuloa Head in the Hawaiian Islands, this is Russell Hoban at his engrossing, inimitable best.

When eighty-three-year-old Irving Goodman falls in love with actress, Justine Trimble, she's been dead for forty-seven years. Irving may not know how he's going to attain his heart's desire but he knows a man who does. Istvan Fallok, a wizard of high technology, sees her on Irving's TV screen and hi-techs Justine out of the video tape and into present-day Soho - in black-and-white. As any reader of Bram Stoker will know, blood is the (full-colour) life and in order for Justine to retain her colour, she has to be topped up now and then - by Irving and his friends and the odd passer-by. Things become a little complicated when Grace Kowalski brings a Justine Two into the picture and not surprisingly the curiosity of the police is soon aroused.

Recently separated, Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in Clerkenwell. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which. Navigating several London underground lines and considerable planetary activity, Russell Hoban's intriguing romance tangos its way through a world of infidelity, artificial eyeballs, baseball bats and music - never missing a daring, seductive step.

For big sisters and little brothers in dens, burrows, and houses everywhere. "Mildred," said Father Muskrat, "it is true that Harvey is selfish and inconsiderate, but he is not stupid and no-good. Mildred is loudmouthed and bossy," Father said to Harvey, "but she is not mean and rotten." When Mildred goes off to a big party where little brothers are not invited, Harvey finds a secret club in a secret place where big sisters are not allowed to be members. But when Harvey's lonesomeness overpowers his stubbornness, he discovers that a secret club with two members is much better.

The inimitable duo of Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake tell a hilarious romp that begins with a wobbly table ... and ends with a bunch of dancing elephants!In this completely hilarious and gloriously absurd story, the pair behind the tales of Captain Najork explore just what happens when a man builds a new table … a table sturdy enough for even an elephant to dance on. “This table,” said the man. “What about the table?” said the woman. “It’s wearing me out,” said the man. What to do? The man makes a decision. He finds a tablewood tree, cuts it down, saws it up and makes a new table. There’s nothing like a new table. This one is strong enough for elephants! But… “Where would we get the elephants?” said the woman. “Advertise in the Classified Section,” said the man. “Elephants wanted for table work. Must be agile.” It looks as if the man and the woman might need some more tables! “We could open a restaurant,” said the man. A restaurant with dancing elephants … where will it all lead?!

Russell Hoban's moving, unflinching tale of a boy who finds bravery during illness is dramatically reimagined in graphic-novel format with new art by Alexis Deacon.

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?