Dear Sarah,

In the spirit of some of the stories I liked best in Bloom's anthology, I am going to make three wishes.

My first wish is that I could write my own introductions to some of the selections in this book to make sure its readers would know that they are not just for future Phi Beta Kappas but truly thrilling and funny and spooky and stirring for anyone who loves good stories.

I'd love to tell those who only know Nathaniel Hawthorne from struggling through The Scarlet Letter in high school what a witty and enchanting story “Feathertop” is, a perfect read for a crisp autumn morning. The title character is a scarecrow enchanted by a witch. As long as he keeps puffing on a magically refilling pipe he appears to be human. He courts the richest girl in town who primps so much for him that “it was the fault of pretty Polly’s ability, rather than her will, if she failed to be as complete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself.” Emile Zola’s “Complements” is a story of a business that sells the one thing a pretty girl can’t resist. G.K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries I enjoyed as a kid, writes in “A Crazy Tale” of “a mad boy who stares at everything.” He is a cross between the wish of Emily in “Our Town” to be truly aware of clocks ticking and new-ironed dresses and a patient from “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bottle Imp” is an impressive entry in the “hero gets a chance to make a wish and is truly sorry for the results” genre that stretches from “The Fisherman and His Wife” to “The Monkey’s Paw.”

Still, that doesn’t stop me from making my next wish—one that is almost required of anyone reviewing an anthology. I want to quibble with some of the selections from authors I don’t think are properly represented. Instead of an excerpt from Five Children and It or another of E. Nesbit’s magnificent stories of children who come upon magic, Bloom gives us her Poe-like story of the consequences of a murder. I am a huge O. Henry fan. I was glad that Bloom chose something other than the always-anthologized “Gift of the Magi” or “Ransom of Red Chief,” but I think he could have done a lot better than “Witches Loaves,” the sour story of a woman whose romantic dreams are dashed. I’d rather have seen “Mammon and the Archer” or “A Retrieved Reformation.” And instead of a second-rate Clovis story, what about Saki’s deliciously wicked “The Unrest-Cure,” “Sredni Vashtar” or “The Story-Teller”? I am always happy to see the Just-So stories, but the ones he picked are very well known. I would rather have seen “The Butterfly That Stamped,” about the king who decided to feed all the animals in the world only to have the entire feast swallowed in one gulp by a large fish. I agree with you that the prose in the collection is stronger than the poetry. I wish he had less of the “nonny nonny” category and that he had put in my childhood favorites, “The Highwayman” and “Annabel Lee.”

My third wish, of course, is to have the chance Bloom had to assemble all of my favorite writing for kids into an anthology some day. And, since this is my wish, I will also wish to have enough money to pay the royalties so I can include 20^th century authors. As someone who once paid triple my own book royalties to include six New Yorker cartoons in a book I wrote, I can’t help suspecting that there was as much a financial incentive to limit Bloom’s book to the 19^th century as an artistic one.

Unfettered by base pecuniary limitations, I will begin with everyone you named in your list. I was especially happy to see you mention my beloved Edward Eager (E. Nesbit’s most worthy successor). I’d pick a chapter from either Half Magic or Knight’s Castle. From Madeleine L’Engle, I’d pick the scene in A Wrinkle in Time where she meets Aunt Beast. I’d also include Richard Kennedy’s haunting story, “The Dark Princess” and his “Come Again in the Spring,” about an old man who has to bargain with Death to stay alive so that he can feed the birds throughout the winter. I’d pick the first chapter of Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg, but I could just as happily make selections from any of her other books. I’d have to have something from T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, which my mother read aloud so beautifully. I’d pick the chapter from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins where the shy heroine meets her seven male cousins, and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” poem. I’d put in Wanda G’ag’s story about the “aminal” who eats dolls. There would be some Roald Dahl and some Tolkien and something from A.A. Milne’s wonderful fairy tale, Once on a Time. And I’d have to pick something from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Now that the statute of limitations on playing hooky has expired, I can confess that that was the one book I just had to pretend I was sick so that I could stay home and finish. I think the section I’d pick from that one would be when Milo conducts the orchestra that plays all the world’s colors.

Last night, as I sat down to begin writing this, I asked my family what they would want to include if they got the chance to create an anthology of favorite stories and poems. My cousin called me back twice to give me more suggestions. My niece read me a chapter from her latest favorite book over the phone, so I could hear how funny it was (it’s Jules Feiffer’s A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, a book that will inspire kids not just to read but to write). My sister reminded me about Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, which we both loved as kids. My teen-agers, who usually race off as soon as they’ve eaten to get back to homework and e-mail, sat around the dinner table with me debating old favorites and not-so favorites. One loved My Side of the Mountain and one hated it, but both wanted to include To Kill a Mockingbird, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Princess Bride, the Redwall series, The Lawrenceville Stories, The Search for Delicious, anything by Lloyd Alexander, and any number of Oz books. We had a perfectly delightful conversation. Bloom may love books because they reach a lonely place in him that no friends or family can. But for me, the best part is sharing the reading I love best with the people I love most to bring us even closer.

Happy reading!

Nell