Recommendations based on "Disney Villains Happily Never After A Villainous Book of Love and Friendship for a Very Special Someone"

“Wistful, witty, and wise—and creepy. . . . Closer in tone to American Gods than to Coraline, but permeated with Bod’s innocence, this needs to be read by anyone who is or has ever been a child.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)By turns macabre, uplifting, sinister, and heartwarming, Neil Gaiman’s #1 national bestseller is an ingenious reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s classic adventure The Jungle Book. Called a “novel of wonder . . . a tale of unforgettable enchantment” by the New York Times Book Review, The Graveyard Book will captivate readers of all ages with its timeless meditation on love, loss, survival, and sacrifice . . . and what it means to truly be alive.

Titles in this set:The Fifth mountain, The devil & miss prym, Eleven Minutes, By the river piedra, The pilgrimage, The witch of portobello, The Valkyries, The Zahir, Veronika decides to die, The alchemist.

A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman’s first new novel for adults since his #1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys.This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real...A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse where she once lived, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.A groundbreaking work as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.

Better watch out ...It's that time of year again. Hogswatchnight. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, to hang mistletoe and holly, and other stuff ending in olly.‘Tis the season when the Hogfather himself dons his red suit and climbs in his sleigh pulled by -- of course! -- eight hogs and brings gifts to all the boys and girls of Discworld.But this year, there's a problem. A stranger has taken the place of the Hogfather. Well, not exactly a stranger. He's actually pretty well known. He carries a scythe along with his bag of toys, and he's going to SLEIGH everyone he sees tonight.Ho ho ho.Even the laugh is wrong. The switch has been arranged by the Auditors, mysterious superbeings who want our universe to be a collection of rocks swinging in curves through space. Life is messy. Why not get rid of it? And who better than -- you know who?Somebody has to rescue the real Hogfather before this morbid impostor tracks soot on the world's carpets. It's up to Ankh-Morpork's intellectual elite, the assembled wizards of Unseen University -- with the help of a monster-bashing nanny, the world's worst inventor, plus a bona-fide, honest-to-god god (the oh god of hangovers, to be precise) -- to come up with a plan to save the universe.And they'd better hurry. The bogus Hogfather is asking the wrong questions. Like: How come rich kids get all the nice toys? How come the poor kids are left with the cheap stuff?"That's life," he is told.Which cuts no ice with Death.

An illustrated rendition of fifty-nine of Aesop's classic fables includes such favorites as "The Boy and the wolf" and "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse," as well as lesser-known tales

A major new collection of Japanese short stories, many appearing in English for the first time, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, author of Killing CommendatoreA Penguin Classics HardcoverThis fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable practitioners writing today. Edited by acclaimed translator Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated some of the stories, and with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, this book is a revelation.Stories by writers already well known to English-language readers are included--like Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, and Yoshimoto--as well as many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's "Flames" to Yuten Sawanishi's "Filling Up with Sugar" to Shin'ichi Hoshi's "Shoulder-Top Secretary" to Banana Yoshimoto's "Bee Honey," The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty, and comedy.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Dorothy thinks she is lost forever when a terrifying tornado crashes through Kansas and whisks her and her dog, Toto, far away to the magical land of Oz. To get home Dorothy must follow the yellow brick road to Emerald City and find the wonderfully mysterious Wizard of Oz. Together with her companions the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion whom she meets on the way, Dorothy embarks on a strange and enchanting adventure. With a charming introduction by award-winning Cornelia Funke, The Wizard of Oz is one of the twenty wonderful classics being relaunched in Puffin Classics in March 2015.

'No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's' Exploring the primordial nightmares that lurk within humanity's dreams of progress and technology, H. G. Wells was a science fiction pioneer. This new omnibus edition brings together four of his hugely original and influential science-fiction novels - The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds - with his most unsettling and strange short stories. Containing monstrous experiments, terrifying journeys, alien occupiers and grotesque creatures, these visionary tales discomfit and disturb, and retain the power to trouble our sense of who we are. With an introduction by Matthew Beaumont

Merry, dark or magical, these classic tales never fail to inspire and enthral. From the land of fantastical castles, vast lakes and deep forests, the Brothers Grimm collected a treasury of entrancing folk and fairy stories full of giants and dwarfs, witches and princesses, magic beasts and cunning boys. From favourites such as "The Frog-Prince" and "Hansel and Gretel" to the delights of "Ashputtel" or "Old Sultan", all are vivid with timeless mystery.

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries. This volume brings together all eleven of his shorter fairy stories as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination". The subjects are those of traditional fantasy: good and wicked fairies, children embarking on elaborate quests, and journeys into unsettling dreamworlds. Within this familiar imaginative landscape, his children's stories were profoundly experimental, questioning the association of childhood with purity and innocence, and the need to separate fairy tale wonder from adult scepticism and disbelief.