"Aesop's Fables belong to every one of us. They were once simply the words of a man who lived 600 years before Christ. The world in which Aesop lived was brutal--a place where death could happen in a moment--but in his imagination it was also a vibrant and magical place, where gods walked among mortals and animals could speak. Aesop's fables were first written down in ancient Greek, and then Latin, where they spread, like the armies of Rome, across...

The author presents a collection of three animal-themed essays. In The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck, a group of complete strangers bitterly discuss the order of things within the animal kingdom. In Hello Kitty, a miserable alcoholic cat attends AA. In The Squirrel and the Chipmunk, two lovers are torn apart by their quarrelling families.

Retells the fable of a frustrated fox that, after many tries to reach a high bunch of grapes, decides they must be sour anyway.

In this variation of the old tale of the ant who gathers food for winter, and the grasshopper who does not prepare, there is an unexpected ending.

"Orphan Jax Aubrey doesn't expect much on his thirteenth birthday, but when he discovers there's an extra day squeezed between Wednesday and Thursday whose origins are rooted in Arthurian legend, it's clear his lfe will never be the same"--

A hungry wolf disguises himself as a sheep in order to steal and eat other members of the flock. He soon becomes the largest and fattest 'sheep,' which the shepherd then catches and cooks for his own dinner.

"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

Retells the fable about an industrious ant that busily prepares for the approaching winter while a grasshopper makes no plans for the cold weather to come.

Artemis Fowl is going straight-as soon as he pulls off the most brilliant criminal feat of his career . . . but his plan goes awry, leaving his loyal bodyguard, Butler, mortally injured. Artemis's only hope of saving his friend is to employ fairy magic; so once again he must contact his old rival, Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon fairy police. It is going to take a miracle to save Butler, and Artemis's luck may have just run out. . .

A modern update on the classic fable of the lion and the mouse shares the relationship between two unlikely friends.