Terry L. Norton

Retelling 30 myths and legends of the Eastern Cherokee, this book presents the stories with important details providing a culturally authentic and historically accurate context. Background information is given within each story so the reader may avoid reliance on glossaries, endnotes, or other explanatory aids. The reader may thus experience the stories more as their original audiences would have. This approach to adapting traditional literature derives from ideas found in reader-response and translation theory and from research in cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics.

Here are 63 traditional stories from world folklore about our nearest relatives: monkeys and apes. As with many tales about other animals, those about monkeys and apes sometimes reflect what we as humans admire about ourselves. However, the stories more frequently embody features that we dislike. Whether they depict monkeys and apes as annoying or clever pranksters, imitative nuisances and troublemakers, loyal and wise friends, or heroic and noble characters who sacrifice themselves for others, the selections in this anthology about our closest primate kin can tell us much about ourselves and what it means to be human.

An agent of chaos and deceit, the trickster has been a favorite character spanning thousands of years and multiple peoples. From legends belonging to Native Americans such as the Creek, Natchez, Seminole and Catawba, to tales borrowed from Africa and Europe, this work discusses 73 trickster tales. Beginning with Creek tales, this book continues with a blend of Native American and African American folktales, organized according to the indigenous people who told them. These stories include the American Southeast's most notorious trickster, Rabbit; his gullible victims such as Alligator, Wildcat and Wolf; and other tricksters such as Buzzard, Pig, Possum and more.