The Miss Nelson Collection

The three classic school stories. Accept no substitute. More than forty years ago Viola Swamp slinked into Room 207 at Horace B. Smedley School and whipped Miss Nelson's terrible, rude, worst-class-in-the-whole-school students into shape. In the intervening generations since the publication of Miss Nelson Is Missing , millions of children have been fascinated by the legend of Miss Swamp. A diabolical creation from the minds of Harry G. Allard and James Marshall, Miss Nelson's alter ego illuminates the folly of misbehavior through amazing feats of disguise. And she's never been more hilarious than now For the first time ever, Miss Nelson Is Missing , Miss Nelson Is Back, and Miss Nelson Has a Field Day are available in one volume. This comical, collectable treasury of stories is a must-have for teachers and their mischievous students everywhere.

Suggests activities to be used at home to accompany the reading of Miss Nelson is missing by Harry Allard in the classroom.

Miss Nelson must leave her class for a little while, and out of boredom the children begin to act up. Miss Nelson finds out about this and calls on her evil friend, the witch, Miss Viola Swamp. Just as in the previous book in this series (Miss Nelson is Missing), Miss Swamp puts More...the children's mischief to bed, and gets the kids working hard again

Librarian from the black lagoon: A class plans their first visit to the library.

The Stupid family celebrates the children's awful report cards by inviting their relatives to a costume party. "Everybody's pet crazies make a return appearance in Allard's story and Marshall's color cartoons, the sequel to their hit The Stupids Step Out." -- Publishers Weekly

"Nelson's prose is precise and energetic, and her insights delight because they manage to be at once surprising and so right as to seem inevitable." -- The New York Times Book Review Antonya Nelson is widely regarded as one of America's most talented women writers -- The New Yorker has named her one of the twenty best writers of her generation -- and with Female Trouble she returns to the short-story form with which she made her original literary mark. Thirteen wise, funny, and startlingly perceptive stories about the vagaries of marriage, the uncertainties of family, and the revelations of female life, Female Trouble looks at the relationships not just between men and women but also between parents and children, brothers and sisters. Probing the subjects of love, fidelity, desire, dependence, and solitude, Nelson explores the broad notion of family from myriad angles, but always with surprising insight and her trademark offbeat humor. The title story features a thirty-year-old man carrying on intimate relationships with three different women -- one institutionalized, one pregnant, one purely maternal -- but unable to commit to any of them. "Incognito" depicts a divorced woman whose turbulent teen years are suddenly brought back to her when she returns to her hometown with her own teenage daughter. In "The Unified Front," a husband reckons with his wife's decision to steal a baby while at a famous theme park, and in "Stitches," a disturbing late-night phone call forces a mother to confront her college-age daughter's sexuality and her own adulterous past. Set in the vividly rendered Southwest and Midwest, these moving stories are dark and honest portraits of people in moral quandaries, gray areas, unclear circumstances -- stories that reveal us to ourselves with disturbing clarity. As always, Nelson astounds with the clean, terse power of her language, and she deftly uses humor to expose the soft underbellies of her tough-talking, unblinking characters. These are stories that will linger in the reader's mind long after they are read.

Practical jokers Spud and Joe get away with every trick in the book until the day they meet a little girl named Mary Frances Hooley.

Late one Friday the 13th in November, Miss Nelson gets an alarming anonymous telephone call. She then takes an ill-starred short cut through the dilapidated and soon-to-be-razed Old East Wing. There she stumbles upon something that almost unhinges her mind and that causes her to swoon. But luckily for her, exactly one week later, and at the very same hour and in the very same spot, an old friend of hers surfaces who, putting her shoulder to the wheel, quickly unmasks the malevolent telephone caller who is bound and determined to oust Miss Nelson from Room 207, nudging her into early retirement, and -with luck- sending her packing to a hospital, clinic, or cozy nursing home specializing in nerve cases. The plot foiled, both Miss Nelson and her tenebrous alter ego, Miss Swamp, turn up trumps again and carry the day.