By James Baldwin
Fifty of the old famous stories every well-read person used to know, William Tell, the boy who cried wolf's grown-up cousins, King Alfred and the burnt cakes, each told short and plain in a couple of pages.
James Baldwin gathered up the stories that used to be everybody's common stock, the ones referred to and quoted for hundreds of years, and retold them for children in short, clear chapters. So here's William Tell shooting the apple off his son's head, King Alfred letting the cakes burn, Robert Bruce watching a spider try six times before it succeeds, Damon offering his own life for his friend, the boy who held his finger in the dike. Each is two or three pages, told plainly, and each one is the kind of story that unlocks a phrase or a reference your child will meet again and again. It reads like a book of small legends, one hero at a time.
This is the storehouse of common cultural references, told at a length a child can actually narrate. Because each tale is short and has a strong shape, it's some of the easiest, most rewarding narration practice there is, and it builds the mental library that lets an older reader catch an allusion later. It sits a step past Aesop: real people and history now, longer than a fable, still short enough to tell back whole.