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Stories are powerful. If a story is well told, listeners feel as if they are in a bit of a trance. Storytellers have always loved to tell stories around a campfire. It's the perfect setting to tell a jump story where the whole point is to startle the listeners. These 13 tales come with tips for telling guaranteed to make the listener jump, scream, gasp, and giggle....
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There is an old saying that good things come in small packages. In this story from Italy, storytellers Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss show us that good things also come in furry packages. When a merchant finds himself in a land that is overrun by rats, he realizes that he has the most priceless gift in this country, namely his ship's cats. In this classic tale, we learn that one man's cats are another man's treasure and vice versa....
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Did you ever look carefully at a spider's web? If their purpose is strictly to catch flies, why do spiders weave such beautiful, intricate webs? Did you ever wonder what causes thunder? Why is the sea salty? How did tigers get their stripes? In this collection of delightful tales from around the world and through the ages, each story explains why an animal, plant, or natural object looks or acts the way it does....
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Call it what you will nincompoop, knucklehead, ninnyhammer, numskull, noodlehead stories of the fool have been around as long as people have been telling stories. Everyone has had a noodlehead day, a day when the brain takes a leave of absence and nothing but noodles seems to fill in the head space above the sinuses....
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When the barnyard animals are invited to a party by their neighbors, they dress in their Sunday best and set off for a day of merriment. But when dinnertime arrives, the famished animals are perplexed to find a simple meal of cornbread. Most of the animals are polite but not Rooster who turns up his beak in disgust. Little did Rooster know that there is a surprise in the cornbread....
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In this Bengali folktale, a barber uses his wits and his trusty mirror to outsmart some scary, but unintelligent ghosts....
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When Goat, Rooster, and Donkey decide to try their hand at farming, all goes well until Donkey's appetite gets the best of him. In this tale from Egypt, Donkey learns the price of being greedy and discovers that the truth will always come out, even if it comes from the bottom of a well....
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As recently as 100 years ago, the great majority of people living on this earth were learning things the old-fashioned way by word of mouth. In the last twenty-five years, the spoken grapevine has come back into its own because of the storytelling renaissance....
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