Bad Day at Riverbend
Bad Day at Riverbend is a 1995 children's book by American writer Chris Van Allsburg. On a quiet day at the town of Riverbend, local sheriff Ned Hardy hears that a strange matter is covering many citizens; when he heads out to investigate, he finds the local stagecoach driver covered in this mass and unable to speak. Distraught but unwilling to surrender, Hardy heads on and finds more people covered in this substance, he is himself covered in this substance and unable to move or speak. It is revealed that the strange matter was none other than crayon scribbles, that the sheriff is part of a coloring book left on its own by a small boy who gets tired and leaves
Jumanji (picture book)
Jumanji is a 1981 fantasy children's picture book and illustrated by the American author Chris Van Allsburg. It was made into a 1995 film of the same name. Both the book and the film are about a magical board game that implements real animals and other jungle elements as the game is played. Jumanji star Robin Williams said "jumanji" is a Zulu word meaning "many effects", as did Van Allsburg. In 2011, Williams recorded an audiobook for its 30th edition. Fritz, a bull terrier in all of Chris Van Allsburg's books, appears as a toy dog on wheels in the third illustration. While their parents are out for the evening and Peter Shepherd, after playing with some toys, become bored and decide to go to the park. There they find. Taking the game home, they find a warning message. Ignoring the warning, they start to play; the pair soon discovers that any dangers encountered in the game spring to life somewhere in the house. For example, when Peter rolls on a lion, a real lion appears, which Judy and Peter trap in their mother's bedroom.
Judy rolls on a stampede, Peter rolls on a monsoon, Judy rolls on an explorer—and each appears in real life to wreak havoc in the house. Still they continue to play; the game ends when Judy rolls a volcano and yells "Jumanji!". In an instant everything is back to normal and the siblings return to the park and abandon the game before their parents return; the story ends when Judy and Peter look outside and see their neighbors and Walter, excitedly returning from the park with Jumanji in their hands with the knowledge that their mother claims the brothers never bother to finish the games they play nor read the instructions. Jumanji, a 1995 film based on the story. Unlike the short story, the film has adult characters that did not appear in the original short story like Alan Parrish, Sarah Whittle, Officer Carl Bentley, Aunt Nora and a big-game hunter named Van Pelt. Not only is Alan Parrish the main protagonist instead of Judy and Peter, but a background story is added, in which the game trapped Alan in the jungle many years earlier while he and Sarah were playing back in 1969.
Danny and Walter Budwing from the end of the original book do not appear in the film. In the film and Peter are orphaned after their parents died in a car accident in Canada and their aunt is now their legal guardian. Other changes are that the animals wreak havoc all over town, Peter transforming into a monkey while trying to cheat and Alan winning the game instead of Judy with everything including time restored back to the way it was before; the drumbeats in the game are heard far away, which never happened in the book. Jumanji, an animated TV series based on the book and the film, which ran from 1996 to 1999. Unlike the book and film, the game transports Judy and Peter in the jungle after taking turns and reading a clue instead of releasing all of the jungle elements and there are other villains besides Van Pelt. Peter transforms into various animals while trying to cheat in a few episodes and Alan Parrish from the film remains trapped in the game until the final episode and Danny and Walter from the end of the original book are absent.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a 2017 film that stars Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan. Though not a strict sequel, it uses many of the same premises as the 1995 film. Zathura is a sequel to Jumanji written by Van Allsburg. In Zathura and Walter Budwing find a science fiction board game that causes the effects of the game to come to life, it has been adapted to film in 2005
The Garden of Abdul Gasazi
The Garden of Abdul Gasazi is a best-selling children's picture book written in 1979 by the American author Chris Van Allsburg. The Garden of Abdul Gasazi was the first book written by Van Allsburg, for which he won a Caldecott Honor in 1980
The Sweetest Fig
The Sweetest Fig is a children's fantasy picture book written in 1993 by the American author Chris Van Allsburg. It tells a story of an affluent, cold-hearted French dentist who eats a fig which makes his wildest dreams come true. Monsieur Bibot is a wealthy dentist, he lives alone in Paris, France, in a fancy apartment with his dog, whom he mistreats and abuses. One day, an impoverished old woman stops by Bibot's office to have her tooth extracted. After removing the tooth with a pair of pliers, making little effort to lessen the pain of the operation, Bibot is angry when the woman is unable to pay his fee in cash. Instead, she pays him by giving him two figs. Bibot scoffs at the thought of magical figs, refuses to give her any painkillers; that evening, Bibot proceeds to eat one of the figs as a midnight snack. He soon discovers that the old woman is right: Bibot finds himself walking Marcel in Paris in his underwear, stared at by the passersby, the Eiffel Tower has drooped over. Everything from his dream the previous night has come true.
Horrified and embarrassed by the mishap, Bibot vows to hypnotize himself to control his dreams so that he may become the richest man on Earth. This self-centered plan involves abandoning Marcel, whom he has continued to harm in more ways than one, but when Bibot is preparing dinner, the dog gobbles up the second fig sitting on the table. Bibot chases the dog around the house. Heartbroken over the fig, Bibot goes to sleep; the next morning, Bibot wakes up underneath his bed – as the dog. Bibot and Marcel have swapped bodies. Bibot is horrified and realizes that the dog was dreaming about getting revenge on his cruel master all along. Marcel, now in human form, tells Bibot it's time for his walk. Bibot tries to yell. Reception was positive. Publishers Weekly praised the book as an "enigmatic, visually sophisticated tale", calling it a "significant achievement". Kirkus Reviews wrote that Van Allsburg's illustrative techniques and "masterful play of patterns" should please all readers, creating a story, "wickedly clever, but fun".
A review from Booklist called it an "astonishing picture book". School Library Journal wrote that The Sweetest Fig was "a superb blend of theme and illustration... Van Allsburg at his best". Common Fig Chris Van Allsburg Paris, France Eiffel Tower
Hardcover
A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are protected by artistic dust jackets, but a "jacketless" alternative is becoming popular: these "paper-over-board" or "jacketless hardcover" bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cover design directly onto the board binding. If brisk sales are anticipated, a hardcover edition of a book is released first, followed by a "trade" paperback edition the next year; some publishers publish paperback originals. For popular books these sales cycles may be extended, followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper.
This is intended to, in part, prolong the life of the immediate buying boom that occurs for some best sellers: After the attention to the book has subsided, a lower-cost version in the paperback, is released to sell further copies. In the past the release of a paperback edition was one year after the hardback, but by the early twenty-first century paperbacks were released six months after the hardback by some publishers, it is unusual for a book, first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback. An example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Books for the general public are printed in hardback only for authors who are expected to be successful, or as a precursor to the paperback to predict sale levels. Hardcovers consist of a page block, two boards, a cloth or heavy paper covering; the pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, it too is covered by the cloth.
A paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. Dust jackets serve to protect the underlying cover from wear. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is a blurb, or a summary of the book; the back flap is. Reviews are placed on the back of the jacket. Many modern bestselling hardcover books use a partial cloth cover, with cloth covered board on the spine only, only boards covering the rest of the book. Bookbinding Paperback
Through the Looking-Glass
Through the Looking-Glass, What Alice Found There is a novel by Lewis Carroll and the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic Through the Looking-Glass includes such verses as "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", the episode involving Tweedledum and Tweedledee; the mirror which inspired Carroll remains displayed in Charlton Kings. Chapter One – Looking-Glass House: Alice is playing with a white kitten and a black kitten when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up onto the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world. In this reflected version of her own house, she finds a book with looking-glass poetry, "Jabberwocky", whose reversed printing she can read only by holding it up to the mirror.
She observes that the chess pieces have come to life, though they remain small enough for her to pick up. Chapter Two – The Garden of Live Flowers: Upon leaving the house, she enters a sunny spring garden where the flowers can speak. Elsewhere in the garden, Alice meets the Red Queen, now human-sized, who impresses Alice with her ability to run at breathtaking speeds. Chapter Three – Looking-Glass Insects: The Red Queen reveals to Alice that the entire countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard, offers to make Alice a queen if she can move all the way to the eighth rank/row in a chess match. Alice is placed in the second rank as one of the White Queen's pawns, begins her journey across the chessboard by boarding a train that jumps over the third row and directly into the fourth rank, thus acting on the rule that pawns can advance two spaces on their first move, she arrives in a forest where a depressed gnat teaches her about the looking glass insects, strange creatures part bug part object, before flying away sadly.
Alice continues her journey and along the way, crosses the "wood where things have no names". There she forgets all nouns, including her own name. With the help of a fawn who has forgotten his identity, she makes it to the other side, where they both remember everything. Realizing that he is a fawn, she is a human, that fawns are afraid of humans, it runs off. Chapter Four – Tweedledum and Tweedledee: She meets the fat twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who she knows from the nursery rhyme. After reciting the long poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter", they draw Alice's attention to the Red King—loudly snoring away under a nearby tree—and maliciously provoke her with idle philosophical banter that she exists only as an imaginary figure in the Red King's dreams; the brothers begin suiting up for battle, only to be frightened away by an enormous crow, as the nursery rhyme about them predicts. Chapter Five – Wool and Water: Alice next meets the White Queen, absent-minded but boasts of her ability to remember future events before they have happened.
Alice and the White Queen advance into the chessboard's fifth rank by crossing over a brook together, but at the moment of the crossing, the Queen transforms into a talking Sheep in a small shop. Alice soon finds herself struggling to handle the oars of a small rowboat, where the Sheep annoys her with nonsensical shouting about "crabs" and "feathers". Chapter Six – Humpty Dumpty: After crossing yet another brook into the sixth rank, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, besides celebrating his unbirthday, provides his own translation of the strange terms in "Jabberwocky". In the process, he introduces Alice to the concept of portmanteau words, before his inevitable fall. Chapter Seven – The Lion and the Unicorn: "All the king's horses and all the king's men" come to Humpty Dumpty's assistance, are accompanied by the White King, along with the Lion and the Unicorn, who again proceed to act out a nursery rhyme by fighting with each other. In this chapter, the March Hare and Hatter of the first book make a brief re-appearance in the guise of "Anglo-Saxon messengers" called "Haigha" and "Hatta".
Chapter Eight – "It's my own Invention": Upon leaving the Lion and Unicorn to their fight, Alice reaches the seventh rank by crossing another brook into the forested territory of the Red Knight, intent on capturing the "white pawn"—Alice—until the White Knight comes to her rescue. Escorting her through the forest towards the final brook-crossing, the Knight recites a long poem of his own composition called Haddocks' Eyes, falls off his horse. Chapter Nine – Queen Alice: Bidding farewell to the White Knight, Alice steps across the last brook, is automatically crowned a queen, with the crown materialising abruptly on her head, she soon finds herself in the company of both the White and Red Queens, who relentlessly confound Alice by using word play to thwart her attempts at logical discussion. They invite one another to a party that will be hosted by the newly crowned Alice—of which Alice herself had no prior knowledge. Chapter Ten – Shaking: Alice arrives and seats herself at her own party, which turns into chaos.
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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, science fiction, fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, television series, comic books. King has published six non-fiction books, he has written 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Society Awards. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he has received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2015, King was awarded with a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature, he has been described as the "King of Horror". King was born September 1947, in Portland, Maine, his father, Donald Edwin King, was a merchant seaman.
Donald was born under the surname Pollock, but as an adult, used the surname King. King's mother was Nellie Ruth; when Stephen King was two years old, his father left the family. King's mother raised Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain; the family moved to De Pere, Fort Wayne and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, his family returned to Durham, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, King chooses to believe in the existence of God; as a child, King witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and in shock. Only did the family learn of the friend's death; some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works, but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing.
King related in detail his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse Macabre, in a chapter titled "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause." King compares his uncle's dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection of short stories he remembers as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios during a 2009 interview, "I knew that I'd found home when I read that book."King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt, he began writing for fun while still in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, began selling to his friends stories based on movies he had seen.
The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber". That story was published the following year in a revised form as "In a Half-World of Terror" in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman; as a teen, King won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English; that year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen. King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump attendant, worker at an industrial laundry. King met his future wife, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the University's Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops. King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor," to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
Many of these early stories have been republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story The Raft was published in a men's magazine. After being arrested for driving over a traffic cone, he was fined $250 and had no money to pay the petty larceny fine. However, payment arrived for the short story The Raft, King was able to pay the fine. In 1971, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Maine, he worked on ideas for novels. In 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. Carrie was King's fourth novel, it was written on a portable typewriter. The novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages of his work in the garbage can. Tabith
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