A collection of fifteen traditional tales from various parts of the world, with the main character of each being a fearless, strong, heroic, and resourceful woman.

Presents a collection of seventy-five tales from various sources in which the protagonists who show their wisdom and cleverness, meet adventure, and find love are all older people.

A collection of thirty shareable fairy tales, folk tales, and fables from around the world that includes magic tales, homey tales, animal tales, and two tales by Jane Yolen.

Why are cats and mice enemies? Why do cats always land on their feet? Are cats as smart as they seem? Here's a story behind each of these feline traits. For centuries, people everywhere, from Tibet to Oman to Scotland to the United States, have been fascinated with cats and their intriguing personalities. In this captivating collection, New York Times best-selling author Jane Yolen has gathered and adapted cat stories, sayings, and nursery rhymes from around the world. The glowing jewel-like illustrations of cats galore in their native homes have been lavishly painted by Hala Wittwer.

A retelling of the African-American tales about the adventures and misadventures of Brer Rabbit and his friends and enemies.

The 107 tales demonstrate the ways an uprooted people have drawn from the traditions of their past to fashion a life in the New World.

"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate . . . " So begins the Nez Percé myth that lies at the heart of The Story of Lynx , Claude Lévi-Strauss's most accessible examination of the rich mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales. Lévi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of gemellarity , or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness—as in the myth of Castor and Pollux—stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Lévi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology.

A collection of classic Jewish folktales which emphasize values and moral lessons, each with an introduction that places it in context with other Jewish teachings.

This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just "what things seem to be." Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down? Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multivalence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory. Sarris's perspective is exceptional: son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay—a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basketweaver and medicine woman—and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.

In this illuminating discussion of the role of animals in Western thought, the author shows, through his analysis of folklore, popular ideas, and natural history, that man's traditional fascination with animals is more than it appears. Professor Sax asserts that "animals put us in touch with modes of perception that are prior to culture. Encounters with animals compel us to question what it means to be human." After summarizing recent research on the bonds between animals and people, the author discusses the two major traditions of animal tales in Western culture, fables and fairy tales. Also discussed is what role specific animals, such as the beaver, stag, and elephant, have played in Western thought.

Thanks to these generous donors for making the publication of the books in this series possible: Lloyd E. Cotsen; The Maurice Amado Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Tales from Arab Lands presents tales from North Africa, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq in the latest volume of the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. This is the third book in the multi-volume series in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg?s timeless classic, Legends of the Jews . The tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), named in Honor of Dov Noy, at The University of Haifa, a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition. This series is a monument to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.

Book by Vilnay, Zev

"The Parliament of Animals represents a scholarly treatise on folkloric and literary narratives of animals. Each chapter on such creatures as elephants, monkeys, rats, snakes, dogs, wolves, cats, and birds includes informative introductions concerning the behavior and psychology of these animals and their relationship to their human counterparts. Useful select bibliographies on zoology, literature, folklore and language conclude these introductory comments which are followed by intriguing fables, legends, anecdotes and literary works concerning the animals under discussion. This book is thus a novel approach to the fascinating subject of the depiction of animals in prose writings over many centuries, giving scholarly information while at the same time providing a splendid collection of readable and enjoyable narratives from anonymous or known authors. The reader is easily engaged by this anthologized treatise on animal behavior, intelligence and psychology, and the obvious result is a better understanding and appreciation of both the animal and the human world. It is exactly this all-inclusive approach to animal narratives that makes this book by Boria Sax such worthwhile reading for naturalists, folklorists, cultural historians, literary scholars, and last but not least, the interested generalists."