The Raven S Tale

A teenage Edgar Allan Poe attempts to escape the allure of his Muse in this YA novel—“a darkly delicious tale that’s sure to haunt readers forevermore” (Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author) Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe counts down the days until he can escape his foster family—the wealthy Allans of Richmond, Virginia. He hungers for his upcoming life as a student at the prestigious new university, almost as much as he longs to marry his beloved Elmira Royster. However, on the brink of his departure, all of Edgar’s plans go awry when a macabre Muse named Lenore appears to him. Muses are frightful creatures that lead Artists down a path of ruin and disgrace, and no respectable person could possibly understand or accept them. But Lenore steps out of the shadows with one request: “Let them see me!”

Raven, the trickster, wants to give people the gift of light. But can he find out where Sky Chief keeps it? And if he does, will he be able to escape without being discovered? His dream seems impossible, but if anyone can find a way to bring light to the world, wise and clever Raven can!

To produce this book, Cheryl Samuel travelled to Leningrad, Copenhagen, and London to examine the six robes in Europe. She also studied the robes housed in museums in Canada and the United States. In 1985, she reconstructed Chief Kotlean's robe, using information she had gathered from her study of the actual robes and Tikhanov's paintings. In the process, she resurrected an old weaving style no longer used by the Native people on the northern coast. Through her extensive and careful research, Cheryl Samuel makes an important contribution to the knowledge of early Indian weaving.

Raven is the principal mythic figure of Indian tribes along the northwest coast of North America, and in easternmost Siberia. His form and behavior are based somewhat on the biological raven--Corvus corax, the black, raucous, hawk-sized scavenger so conspicuous around settlements in the Pacific Northwest. Prominently featured in artifacts from spoons and bowls to gigantic ceremonial totem poles, Raven is the protagonist in a cycle of folktales told among the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, and other Canadian and Alaskan tribes, and among the Siberian Koryak and Chukchi. Tales of Raven have been collected by ethnographers and folklorists since the late nineteenth century most notably by Franz Boas, but this is the first full-scale study of the tales ever published. Here, Northwest Coast raven tales, beginning with those of the Tlingit, are placed in the context of other native mythologies, including non-Indian ones.--From publisher description.

In the far north of Canada, daylight disappears for much of the year. This Inuit legend describes how the First People of Canada explained the sun’s return to their remote lands.

“Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic.” — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities. A trio of gluttonous burglars invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits—and his life—when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim. Select stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino's legacy.

As Sukaq's mother tells him the story of how the raven created the world, he is suddenly whisked away on the wings of the raven to ride along as the entire world is formed!