"If food dropped like rain from the sky, wouldn't it be marvelous! Or would it? It could, after all, be messy. And you'd have no choice. What if you didn't like what fell? Or what if too much came? Have you ever thought of what it might be like to to be squashed flat by a pancake?" --back cover

"This delightful production deserves a place in all tale tale collections." - School Library Journal Swamp Angel can lasso a tornado, and drink an entire lake dry. She single-handedly defeats the fearsome bear known as Thundering Tarnation, wrestling him from the top of the Great Smoky Mountains to the bottom of a deep lake. A humorous, original tall tale set on the American frontier. Anne Isaacs was born in Buffalo, New York, where she lived until...

Grandad bakes Grandma a whopper of a birthday cake. Includes recipe and directions for chocolate cake.

William Bloom is a young man who never really knew his now-dying father, Edward -- outside of the tall tales his dad told him about growing up. During Edward's last days, William and his wife Josephine hold a bedside vigil next to the old man as he recollects elaborate memories of his youth. Still doubting the legends and folklore, William makes a journey to meet a mysterious woman from whom Edward had bought property.

"Cat has found a broken cookie jar. How did it happen? And where are the cookies? Those are good questions. Mouse will explain . . ." --back cover

A father relates to his son the tale of his encounter--and friendship--with a gigantic trout whose enormous jaw is covered with so many lures and fish hooks that he jangles when he swims, but who has never been caught.

Retells, in tall-tale fashion, how Levi Strauss went to California during the Gold Rush, saw the need for a sturdier kind of trouser, and invented jeans.

Retells thirteen American tall tales, with each short poem inviting two readers to read their own parts, and then read the passage in the central column together.

Relates some of the exploits of Paul Bunyan, a lumberjack said to be taller than the trees whose pet was a blue ox named Babe.