Böcker utgivna av Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

When the carnival comes to town, the world's favorite fractious feline discovers the hilariously wrong way to victory before he gets it right. "Illustrated with Rubel's deadpan pictures, this is a prize for newly independent readers, for whom 'practice makes perfect' indeed." -The Horn Book Guide "Ralph has his own special niche in the world of children's literature, and now on the easy-reader shelves, too." -Kirkus Reviews*

Although young Montague Mad-Rat lives in--or rather, under--New York City, he know very few rats besides his mother, who makes hats, his father, who builds mud castles, and his globe-trotting Aunt Elizabeth. But Montague's life takes an abrupt turn for the eventful the stormy day he meets Isabel Moberly-Rat on his way home from Central Park.Home, for Montague, is an old sewer pipe. He now learns that there is a cityful of other rats out there who inhabit abandoned piers and lead considerably less eccentric and more luxurious lives than his family. What's more, these rats are in the midst of a grave crises. A human being has decided to turn their piers into parking lots, and an extermination campaign is already under way.As Montague stumbles into this wider, bewildering world, he long to help ratdom (and impress Isabel). But what can he do, when his only talent is painting the seashells his Aunt Elizabeth brings him from her travels? And to make matters worse, it turns out that a drunken uncle of his, Montague Mad-Rat the Elder, has made their name a standing joke in the rat world. For the first time in his life, young Montague finds out what it is to feel helpless and alone--little realizing that he has not only Isabel and his seashells on his side but his despised drunken uncle as well.

Don't miss Barbara O'Connor's other middle-grade work-like Wish; Wonderland; How to Steal a Dog; Greetings from Nowhere; The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester; and more!Will a spelling bee be the answer to all of Bird's problems? In this laugh-out-loud novel from Barbara O'Connor, a spunky young girl discovers that sometimes all it takes to feel famous is a little recognition from true friends.All her life, all Bird has ever wanted is to be noticed in her small town and to get to Disney World. As it turns out, Bird just might have a chance to realize at least one of her goals because of a state spelling bee, and she might get to make a friend along the way-a boy named Harlem Tate who has just moved to Freedom. Harlem seems like a kindred spirit-someone like Bird, whom people don't usually take the time to find the good in. (Unless it's someone like Miss Delphine, who always makes Bird feel special.) But as much as Bird tries to get his attention, Harlem is not easily won over. Then Harlem agrees to be her partner in the spelling bee, and if they study hard enough, the two might just win everything Bird's always wanted.Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia is a 2004 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year. This title has Common Core connections.

A tribute to Florida, fishing, and familyAll Skeet Waters wants is to catch a big, beautiful tarpon on his fly rod - and to keep everything else in his life in Florida the way it's always been. But on his spring break from school, Skeet overhears his mother telling his father to move out permanently. Then, while riding in his boat to escape his parents' troubles, he discovers a manatee that's been shot in the head. Skeet puts aside his search for the manatee and its killer when Dirty Dan the Tarpon Man offers to take him out to catch his first tarpon on a fly. Because of Dan, Skeet begins tounravel the mysteries surrounding the manatee's apparent murder and his parents' dissolving marriage.Skeet discovers that life is a lot like tarpon fishing, in which you can't look just at the surface of the water - you have to look through it, at what lies beneath.The Missing Manatee is a nominee for the 2006 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery.

Meet one smart chicken chaser. She can catch any chicken on her grandmother's farm except one - the elusive Miss Hen. In a hilarious battle of wits, the spirited narrator regales readers with her campaign to catch Miss Hen, but this chicken is "fast as a mosquito buzzing and quick as a fleabite." Our chicken chaser has her mind set on winning, until she discovers that sometimes it's just as satisfying not to catch chickens as it is to catch them.A fresh voice full of sass and inventive, bold collage illustrations full of surprises create a childlike escapade brimming with funny high jinks that leads the reader on a merry, memorable chase.The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Full of humor and spunk - just like Esther!"I could do that," says six-year-old Esther as she watches her mother making tea. Start her own business at the age of nineteen? Why, she could do that, too. But one thing Esther and other women could NOT do was vote. Only men could do that.With lively text and humorous illustrations as full of spirit as Esther herself, this striking picture book biography shows how one girl's gumption propels her through a life filled with challenges until, in 1869, she wins the vote for women in Wyoming Territory - the first time ever in the United States!I Could Do That! is a 2006 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

The long-awaited second full-length collection from one of our most exciting poets.Imagine if you will a pageant on a hilland picture if you can a boydesigned to be impaled upon a stiltand bleed for a panelist's joyJeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "A shadow world, seen by a visionary" (Rain Taxi); "a 120-page spell" (American Letters & Commentary); "a happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" (Boston Review); "devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" (Arras); "thick, purring music" (Rhizome).In Music and Suicide, his second collection, Clark moves away from the sinisterism and mask-ridden black humor of his debut, into a present mazy with freed shadow, somatic magic, and post-suffocatory seeing.

A look at the life of migrant workers through a child's eyesEmma Turner loves books and dreams of one day having the store-bought kind, but the Turners are migrant workers and money is tight. That means "no extras," so Emma must be content to make her own stories and books. Emma has a plan, though - she's going to save all the money she earns picking apples and put it in Mama's hard-times jar. Then there will surely be enough for extras. But when Mama tells Emma that this year she has to go to school instead of to work, it spoils everything. Now she will never own a store-bought book! But school turns out to have a wonderful surprise in store for Emma.Based on Ethel Footman Smothers's childhood, the story is brought to life with lush acrylic paintings, giving us a touching portrait of a book-hungry child.

Search for the secrets of a hidden tombIt is 1924, two years after the discovery of King Tut's tomb. Readers are invited to join a young boy, Will Hunt, as he and his family become part of an archaeological team led by world-famous Egyptologist Dr. George Reisner. Based on actual records of Reisner's history-making dig, Giza 7000X, this strikingly original picture book uses journal entries, funny postcards, and quirky cartoons to pull readers into an ancient unsolved mystery. Luminous paintings of the pyramids, informative sidebars and inventive collages, including authentic documents and archival photographs, help provide information and clues. When a secret tomb is uncovered, readers, along with Will, put together clues to discover: Whose tomb is this? Why was it hidden? And how can a mummy be missing from a sealed tomb?This illuminating book invites readers to participate in the process of archaeology as it provides a rare glimpse into the true stories that exist behind the objects in museums. The 5,000-Year-Old Puzzle is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

A "very vivid and entertaining tale of fair play and poetic justice,"* The Araboolies of Liberty Street by writer Sam Swope and illustrator Barry Root is the story of a family overcoming neighborhood prejudice.The General and Mrs. Pinch have always prided themselves on the character of those living on Liberty Street. But when the Araboolies move in, the rigid conformity stifling the neighbors is shattered by the newcomers' joyous and eccentric behavior. Now, the General has called in the army to reestablish order-only to find resistance from the children of Liberty Street determined to ensure the freedom of their newfound friends, the Araboolies. "Even on a street named for freedom itself, people conform and are terrified by bullies, by killjoys...Enter the Araboolies, an irrepressible extended family of multicolored vagabonds [with] rollicking, nonconformist behavior."-*The New York Times Book Review"The crisp text and autumn-muted, full-color paintings are a triumph of energy, enthusiasm, and design."-Booklist (starred review)

Yeeeeeee-haw! Git along, little . . . turkeys?Big, brawny Simon Green, who's just completed third grade (for the fourth time), may not be book smart, but he's nobody's fool. When it's time to be done with school and make his way in the world, Simon hatches a plan that could earn him a bundle. He intends to herd a huge flock of bronze turkeysall the way from his home in eastern Missouri to the boomtown of Denver, where they'll fetch a mighty price. In the year 1860, the hazards of such a trek are many - how does one shepherd the birds across a river, for instance? - but Simon is undaunted. Accompanied by a faithful drover, and eventually to be joined by two boon companions, he undertakes the biggest journey of his young life, in this high-spirited Wild Wild West adventure by an acclaimed author of historical fiction.

Reflective later poems of the fiery, Nobel-Prize winning Chilean poet, presented here with the English translations and original Spanish side-by-side on facing pages.In the over one hundred poems contained in Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda fashioned a kind of poetic autobiography in which he set out to explore and gather the various "lives" or "selves" he had left behind him in the huge span of his writing existence. Written in his "autumnal" period, from the vantage point of Isla Negra, the small village on the Pacific coast of Chile which he came to regard as the center of his world, the book reads like a series of notes in which present and past interact, and is perhaps the most self-confronting of all his collections.

In Greenville, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state, Henri Vaillancourt makes birch-bark canoes in the same manner and with the same tools that the Indians used. The Survival of the Bark Canoe is the story of this ancient craft and of a 150-mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology. It is a book squarely in the tradition of one written by the first tourist in these woods, Henry David Thoreau, whose The Maine Woods recounts similar journeys in similar vessel. As McPhee describes the expedition he made with Vaillancourt, he also traces the evolution of the bark canoe, from its beginnings through the development of the huge canoes used by the fur traders of the Canadian North Woods, where the bark canoe played the key role in opening up the wilderness. He discusses as well the differing types of bark canoes, whose construction varied from tribe to tribe, according to custom and available materials. In a style as pure and as effortless as the waters of Maine and the glide of a canoe, John McPhee has written one of his most fascinating books, one in which his talents as a journalist are on brilliant display.

The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world-a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.