TELEPHONE TALES

By Gianni Rodari
Illustrated by Valerio Vidali
Translated from Italian by Anthony Shugaar

★ Winner of the 2021 Mildred A. Batchelder Award

★ Winner of the 2020 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s English Translation Prize

• Every night, at nine o’clock, wherever he is, Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often travels for work, calls his daughter and tells her a bedtime story.
• Set in the 20th century era of pay phones, each story has to be told in the time that a single coin will buy.
• One night, it’s the story of a carousel so beloved by children that an old man finally sneaks on to understand why, and as he sails above the world, he does.
• The next night, it’s a land filled with butter men, roads paved with chocolate, or a young shrimp who has the courage to defy expectations and do things differently.
• Reminiscent of Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights, Gianni Rodari’s Telephone Tales is composed of many stories within a story.
• Each is set in a different place and time, with unconventional characters and a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy.
• Awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970, Gianni Rodari is widely considered to be Italy’s most important children’s author of the 20th century.
• Gorgeously illustrated by Italian artist Valerio Vidali​, these stories entertain with wit, surprise, and imagination.
• 6.25" (W) x 9.5" (H)
• 212 pages
  
• Hard Cover