05 Tricky Spider Tales

Spider wants to be a police captain! Can he capture the evil Blacksnake and show the town he’s a hero? Maybe he can stop Lion from stealing the other animals’ food—but if he’s not careful, he might wind up in Lion’s belly! In these West African Spider tales, YOU decide what happens next! Six journeys to follow! Which will YOU take?

Spider wants to be a police captain! Can he capture the evil Blacksnake and show the town he's a hero? Maybe he can stop Lion from stealing the other animals' food-but if he's not careful, he might wind up in Lion's belly!

Anansi the Spiderman or rather spider and man originated with the Ashanti people of present day Ghana. Anansi's father, the Sky God Nyame, got so tired of his son's pranks that he turned him into a spider. The stories of Anansi were brought to the Caribbean by slaves, some of whom kept up the oral tradition of their people by recounting some event in the life of their village. The stories also included some folklore such as the life and times of Anansi, the trickster. Accordingly Anansi is described as a creature who was always trying to best anyone with whom he came in contact. The general idea for him was that although small he could outsmart creatures much bigger than himself. This is actually a lesson for us that we should depend on brain power rather than the physical. Anansi took pride in this and sometimes came out on top but sometime things went badly for him. When he was victorious he was “The Man” but during the bad times he became the spider and retreated to his web to hide and wait for more opportunities to outsmart his friends. My granddaughter, Mikailah, is so enamored with Anansi, “The Man” that she only wants to hear stories in which he is victorious in tricking other creatures. She calls him “Nancy”. Her favorite story is about Anansi and Brer Tiger in which Anansi was “sick” and got Brer Tiger to take him to the doctor…

A witty, often devious spider is the charming hero of these African folk tales from the Ashanti tribe.

Issue for Dec. 1953 (v. 3, no. 3/4) cumulative from 1950.

A fun and playful story by Margaret Wise Brown, best-selling author of the children's classics Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny. Follow the story of the little boy and the tickly spider as they learn how to share in this picture book written by the author of Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown.

This book focuses on sex and sexuality in post-war novels from the Anglophone Caribbean. Countering the critical orthodoxy that literature from this period dealt with sex only tangentially, implicitly transmitting sexist or homophobic messages, the author instead highlights the range and diversity in its representations of sexual life. She draws on gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial theory and cultural history to provide new readings of seminal figures like Samuel Selvon and George Lamming whilst also calling attention to the work of innovative, lesser-studied authors such as Andrew Salkey, Oscar Dathorne and Rosa Guy. Offering a coherent and expansive overview of how post-war Caribbean novelists have treated the persistently controversial topic of sex, this book addresses one of the blind spots in Caribbean literary criticism. It mines a range of little-studied archival materials and texts to argue that fiction of the post-war era exhibits both continuities with the sexual emphases of earlier writing and connections to later trends. The author also presents nationalist ideology as central to the literature of this era. It is in the fictional rendering of sexuality that the contradictions of the nationalist project are most apparent; sex both exceeds and threatens the imagined unity on which the political vision depends.