Synopses & Reviews
Honor Book for the Society of School Librarians Internationals Best Book Award - Language Arts, Grades K-6 NovelsSelected as one of four recipients of the 2004 Aesop Accolade
Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Fiction Titles 2003
At about the time the Grimm Brothers were gathering their famous collection of folk stories and fairy tales in Europe, in China a similar collection of almost five hundred stories had just been compiled by the scholar Pu Sing-ling. Drawing on oral and written sources, he called his collection of the strange and wondrous Strange Tales from a Studio of Leisure.
The fruits of his lifes work become immensely popular with storytellers who performed the stories in teahouses, where rapt audiences would sit for half a day drinking tea and listening to tales of ghosts, fox fairies, and other wonders.
Almost unknown in the West, the stories are given new life in this important work by the masterful Michael Bedard.
About the Author
Michael Bedard was born and raised in Toronto. His novels include Stained Glass, A Darker Magic, Painted Devil, and Redwork, which received the Governor Generals Literary Award and the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children. He has also written several acclaimed picture books, including The Clay Ladies, illustrated by Les Tait, which received the Toronto IODE Book Award.