Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

Additional Contributors Are Ray Dudley, William Knickerbocker, Clarence Melville Shipley, And Geoffrey Stone.

This is a new release of the original 1943 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Contains a selection of folktales collected in Vietnam from 1960 to 1975.

Despite the rustic charm of their settings, the bitingly humorous short stories of Dorothy Thomas (1898-1990) challenge stereotypes of good-hearted country people-a harried woman tries to rid herself of her impertinent son as he refuses to cooperate with her plans to leave him and his father for another man; an old woman given a late second chance to marry the man she loves loses out once more because of her literal mindedness; a child's fib grows into a detailed fiction leading one family to embarrassment and another to stretch beyond their means; and two little girls with childish ingenuity foil their step-mother's opportunity for a romantic fling when their father is away.

In these twelve stories Thomas is most concerned with the flaws in familial relationships, but her analysis never turns bitter. Thomas used what she called "telling detail" to animate her characters as they repeatedly trump their family's needs with their own desires, and children are often the most prescient of all about the self-destructive plans of the adults around them.

Dorothy Thomas dropped out of high school and taught school in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to help support her family. While living in western Nebraska, she began to write short stories inspired by the insights afforded by her position as a live-in teacher in the homes of her students. She began to publish her stories in magazines such as the "New Yorker" and "Atlantic Monthly" and eventually gave up teaching to write full time. She also published two books--"Ma Jeeter's Girls" and "The Home Place," both available in Bison Books edition--and became part of the writing community centered around the literary magazine "Prairie Schooner."

Ma Jeeter, a sensible and hearty farm woman, tells the stories of the courtships of five daughters to the schoolteacher who boards with her. Ella, Bell, Lena, Laura, and Lizzie all got bitten and burdened early, thanks to the bumblebee of love. Now her youngest, Evie, is coming home to be married, and everything is as it should be.

The Jeeters are based loosely on a funny, goodhearted family that Dorothy Thomas lived with in her schoolteaching days. H. L. Mencken, the famed editor, author, and critic, encouraged her to write these vignettes about them. Original pen and ink drawings by the author have been added to this edition.