Alan Garner has become, through a relatively modest output, one of the most important writers for children since 1960. His work is carefully crafted, economic, and precise. His early works-- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (1960), The M...

When Alan Garner was a child, he almost died three times. A very sickly boy, he suffered variously from spinal and cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and diphtheria, at times so ill that he could neither speak nor move. It was on these occasions t...

In 1968 Alan Garner, defending his focus on the adolescent audience, asserted in "A Bit More Practice" that "This group of people is the most important of all, and selfishly, it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement." Yet...

Czech Clarinet Quartet: Echoes from Stone Jina vlna & Czech Clarinet Quartet [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Czech Clarinet Quartet was founded by students, today graduates of the Prague Music Academy HAMU. Over the few years of its existence it has developed...

The String Quartets of Beethoven. Edited by William Kinderman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [360 p. ISBN 0-252-03036-2. $75.] Music examples, index, bibliography. "No group of compositions occupies a more central position in chamber music than Beethoven's string quartets, yet the...

There are many close encounters in store for the reader of Alan Garner's work, and this is certainly true of [The Aimer Gate]. The language is cut concisely, the style exact and easy like a kind of music…. These books [of the Stone Book quartet] stand somewhat like four movements of Vivaldi's music. And there is music in everyone, an ophicleide or a cornet, and always a song. Although appearing last, The Aimer Gate is third in time and even in classic sonata form, the story of Chorley 1...

In his Stone Book quartet, Alan Garner traces the lives of four generations of a working-class family in Chorley, a Cheshire village. Sentimental primitivism pervades Mr. Garner's books. His characters are by place possessed, and nostalgia for lost occupations and identities weighs heavy…. The Stone Book Quartet is gracefully written and at times wonderfully provocative. Frequently Mr. Garner uses old-fashioned words whose sounds convey their sense. Mystery abounds in the books, and events are...