The Children's Literature Podcast

It wouldn’t be Halloween without something Grimm, and so for my penultimate tale in my 13 Nights of Halloween I offer you “Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen” or “The The Story of a Young Man Who Went Forth to Learn Fear.” This tale was translated in 1889 by Andrew Lang to be included in his famous Blue Fairy Book . It’s about a young man who i...

Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you have to stop having a good time, as W.D. Westervelt discovered back in 1915 when he collected this story in Hawaii and translated it into English. “A Visit to the King of the Ghosts” was the title of Chapter 13 of his book Legends of Gods and Ghosts. It depicts an afterlife where people still eat, sleep, are married, go surfing, dan...

For hundreds of years, sailors have seen the Flying Dutchman – a ghost ship that is doomed to sail forever in troubled waters after its foolish and greedy captain took it through a storm. The Dutchman sank, taking its entire crew to the bottom with it. Here I present the two earliest written accounts of the Dutchman, and we see that not everyone who hears the tale is a believer. John MacDona...

This is the True(?) Story of the Black Dog that has been terrorizing the East of England since 1577. The Black Dog, also called Black Shuck, is a famous apparition that has terrorized East Anglia for centuries. He first appeared at the village church in Bongay (pronouned BUN-gee), where the marks of his claws can still be seen in the church door. To this day, folk tell tales of their own encounter...

These are the 13 nights of Halloween, during which I will spook you silly with awful anecdotes. Tonight’s terrible tale is “The Honest Witch,” a story about a real Korean courtier who, four hundred years ago, discovered that not all witches need to be burned. This story was first recorded by Im Bang in the 17th century, and the event allegedly happened within the author’s own lif...

They say that in the depths of Windsor Forest, the ghost of a vengeful huntsman rides on a steed with hooves of flame, taking out his wrath on the wicked — or in some accounts, innocent livestock. Shakespeare wrote about Herne in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the legends are still told today about the mysterious rider with the stag’s horns on his head. If you’d like th...

Welcome to my 13 Nights of Halloween, during which I will heebie your jeebies with freaky folktales. Tonight’s terrifying tale is “The Finger,” is a Jewish folktale which was recorded nearly 400 years ago. https://youtu.be/lyqLZOOcCBw This story is as funny as it is creepy, and it was what inspired Tim Burton to make his film Corpse Bride. Reuven is ready to marry his beloved, but a dr...

Welcome to my 13 Nights of Halloween, during which I will torment you with terrible tales Tonight’s freakish bit of folklore is “Kuchisake-onna” or “The Woman With the Slit Mouth,” a ghost legend from Japan that goes back many hundreds of years but which became a frightening urban phenomenon in the 20th Century in Japan. This malevolent spirit is the ghost of a vain woman w...

Welcome to my 13 Nights of Halloween, where I will share frightening folktales guaranteed to scare the bejeebers out of you. Tonight’s story is “The Baba Yaga” which comes from William Ralston’s 1873 collection of Russian Folk-Tales. Baba Yaga is a delightfully nasty witch who never apologizes and likes to eat up little girls and boys who are too stupid to escape from her. She rides around i...

This is the second of my 13 Nights of Halloween, and tonight you will hear “The Ghost Sailor,” a folktale that comes from the Mashpee people of Cape Cod. This is my own retelling, and the story teaches us that you can’t put a price on the safety of your children. PREPARE YOURSELVES! And please enjoy “The Ghost Sailor” If you would like a commentary-free version of this stor...

Welcome to my 13 Nights of Halloween, where I will share frightening folktales guaranteed to scare the bejeebers out of you. These are stories so scary that most grownups won’t share them with children any more. But I think we’ve gone soft! Bring back the screams, the peril, the ghastly, the ghoulish. Kids from the past loved feeling their hair stand on end, and so do kids today. Tonig...

This evening’s Fireside Fairy Tale is “Cap O’ Rushes,” a tale printed in English Fairy Tales, which was a collection made by Joseph Jacobs in 1890. He gave the author as “Anonymous,” which isn’t totally correct. The authors are the common people of England. Cap O’ Rushes is interesting because it combines elements of King Lear with the structure of a...

I adored Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons as a kid. I had to respect Wile E. Coyote for never giving up, no matter how many times he was smashed, bashed, crashed, blown to smithereens, or launched in the air only to fall down into that canyon . . . AGAIN. I was very happy to finally get the chance to see Coyote Vs. Acme. I hoped I would laugh . . . but ended up crying!

This is a super deep dive into the newly released photo of the main cast of Greta Gerwig’s first Chronicles of Narnia project, which is a film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew. The setting has inexplicably been taken from the late 19th century to the 1950’s, and the only representation of a working class Englishman has been removed from the film, which doesn’t quite sit...

I said it before. I’m saying it again. Greta Gerwig was not the right person to adapt the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, and Empire Magazine’s glossy spread on the first film (allegedly) based on The Magician’s Nephew reveals a number of very bad story changes that will compromise the plot and alienate a whole lot of potential customers.

“Love Story” from Taylor Swift’s 2008 album Fearless takes the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and gives it a happy ending. All it took was for the characters in the play to confront their problems head on instead of sneaking around. Key to the success of Swift’s love story is that there wasn’t a Friar Lawrence there to come up with a truly idiotic and overcomplicated pla...

To mark the 30th birthday of Muppet Treasure Island and pay tribute to the late and eternally great Tim Curry, Tom the Tale Teller and I sat down to rewatch this classic work based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. On this rewatch we noticed a bunch of jokes that went RIGHT over our heads as kids. Now we understand why our parents were laughing. As with Muppet Christmas Carol, this film lov...

Dolly Parton was an angel on Earth, entertaining with kindness and warmth. And she spent an absolute fortune helping millions of children learn to love reading from an early age. We didn’t deserve her. But I am so grateful we had her.

I liked Green Lantern comics as a kid. I hoped rather than believed that the new TV adaptation of this DC property would be any good. It wasn’t any good.

I took my six year old to see the Paw Patrol Dino Movie and I was astonished to discover that writers Cal Brunker and Bob Barlen have brilliantly adapted the 1902 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which meditates on the barbarous nature of humanity and its unquenchable lust for money, goods, and power.

250 Episodes!! My goodness!! Thank you to all of you, whether you have been with the show for a long time or have just recently joined in the fun. I did a livestream to celebrate! It was so nice to chat with lots of you, and I rambled about two of my favorite subjects: Star Trek and Shakespeare. I’ve ranked my top 10 favorite moments from Star Trek that reference the works of William Shakesp...

I am very delighted to have Dr. Adam S. Smith and Jonathan Emmett return as guests on my show to talk about their splendid new book Great Dinosaur Mistakes, which features famous errors in the ways early paleontologists interpreted fossil finds and how the process of science improves those interpretations. The brilliant illustrations of Stieven Van Der Poorten bring this book to life. These author...

It was too windy for me to sit by the fire, so come join me as I invoke the blessings of Apollo, patron of storytellers, by sitting in front of musical instruments wearing laurel leaves. I really enjoyed the special effects and visual storytelling in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, particularly the scene with Polyphemus the cyclops, a character portrayed with the use of an enormous puppet. Howe...

Emily Wilson, translator of the unneccesarily hated and gossiped-about translation of Homer’s Odyssey, has seen Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey and . . . she HATES it. Hilariously, and with all of the scorn that only a very posh professor can heap upon a film review. I love it.

Supergirl was produced by James Gunn, directed by Craig Gillespie, and directed by Ana Nogueira. I blame all three of them equally for this very, very bad movie. Millie Alcock was not the right choice for Supergirl but she’s just an actress doing a gig, so I don’t blame her. This film was such a raging disappointment that I needed to unleash my fury in the way that only a passive-aggre...