Just So Stories

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in India in 1865 to British parents, and brought up by a Portuguese `ayah¿ (nanny) and an Indian servant, who would entertain him with fabulous stories and Indian nursery rhymes. He was sent back to England when he was seven years old, and lived in a boarding house with a couple who were cruelly strict. Fortunately he returned to India aged sixteen, to work as the assistant editor of a newspaper in Lahore. He began publishing stories and poems and eventually had great success with his book Plain Tales from the Hills. After his marriage Kipling settled in America, and it was here that he wrote The Jungle Book. He then moved with his family to England, where he wrote Just So Stories for his daughter Josephine who later tragically died of pneumonia. Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and died on 18 January 1936.

Kipling has an Aesopian understanding of animals, of our dealings with them and our curious interrelatedness, interdependence, how we can learn about our own strange behaviour.

How did the camel get his hump? Why won't cats do as they are told? Who invented reading and writing? How did an inquisitive little elephant change the lives of elephants everywhere? Kipling's imagined answers to such questions draw on the beast fables he heard as a child in India, as well as on folk games with language, exploring the relationships between thought, speech, and the written word. He also celebrates his own joy in fatherhood. The tales were told to his own and his friends' children over many years before he wrote them down, adding poems and his own illustrations. They invite older and younger readers to share a magical experience, each contributing to the other's pleasure, but each can also enjoy them alone, as more jokes, subtexts, and exotic references emerge with every reading. This fully illustrated edition includes two extra stories and Kipling's own explanation of the title.

How the Whale Got His Throat
How the Camel Got His Hump
How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin
How the Leopard Got His Spots
The Elephant's Child/How the Elephant got his Trunk
The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo
The Beginning of the Armadillos
How the First Letter Was Written
How the Alphabet Was Made
The Crab That Played with the Sea
The Cat That Walked by Himself
The Butterfly That Stamped