I bought the paperback edition in late July 1985 and,beleieve it or not,I have read it more than a hundred times over and over again.It's an astounding story, many clues are given while you read the book on how E.T. can solve his problems. The keen reader can easily predict the outcome of the plot.The way the author connects the two realities, one on the Green planet , the other on Earth is nicely blended through the introduction of the telepathic beam, naturally off course, 'cause et's a little mixed up.This gives way to many funny situations. The book can be read at many levels; Et's worried about elliot becoming grown up.According to et's point of view, people on earth grew up to become violent so his mission now is to save his friend.This is a great message of peace. I think the book is not indicated for children too young, to which I advise reading the illustrated storybook instead.To conclude I always ask myself why in these years Kotzwinkle didn't write a sequel to this book due to its open ending.In an interview, spielberg said that his movie ET is a "gem the way it is" so a sequel was not necessary 'cause it would currupt its magic.I think a new adventure for ET would be great indeed!!

This novel is a joy to read. It leaves off where the movie ended, starting with E. T. watching the Earth slowly disappear out of the porthole of his spaceship. Kotzwinkle has a wonderful imagination and provides a heartwarming tale about growing up, memories, love, friendship, and best of all - adventure. This is a great read. It should be made into a movie. I give it a 5!

I read this book once over 15 years ago, and I still remember it! It is a haunting and memorable modern mythical journey with an outrageous eroticism that has you baffled and entertained simultaneously. Imagine if you can ...a love-smitten cricket (or is it a grasshopper) who enjoys a shipboard romance in the folds of a woman's ****! The illustrations are fine pencil versions where film noir meets Alice in Wonderland and Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra. Yes, there is a golden sarcaphagus.

This illustrated fantasy is on my top shelf. Each moody full-page illustration is accompanied by one or two paragraphs of an otherworldly story involving a detective, the strange man he is following, and a dark unhappy woman who is courted in the Orient by the soul of a grasshopper. ( ! ) This haunting mix of imagery gave me strange dreams the first time I read it

I had a radio drama show on a public radio station for five years and would vary scripted, acted radio dramas(live w/ music and foley artist or taped with sfx and music) with talented actors reading their favorite stories. I first read Jewel of the Moon ten years ago and received such a response that the local booksellers sold out. Later, as I have been asked to read at various events, I often select JEWEL OF THE MOON and insist that I'm last on the docket, as it has such an impact. Of course, some of this is from the way I've read it but the written artistry is all Kotzwinkle. I've often thought of creating an entire spoken story theatre piece around this particular story and taking it to Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it would shine. Gonna have to wait for the lottery sometime next year:> BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU CAN FIND IT!!

The very best short stories i ever read beside brautigan s tokio montana express. A summary of funny, erotic, sometimes fairytail-like jewels of a mastermind. the stories are as freaky as the author himself. i would go nowhere without this book. i will read it and read it and read....

The Million-Dollar Bear is the most entertaining story I have read for a while. It starts with two eccentric rich old men who both are absorbed in their collection of bears. But, they both want to own the first Teddy Bear - the million dollar bear. One actually steals the bear from the other and is pompous enough to admit it. I am drawn into the story by the "million-dollar" bear who only wants to be loved for who he is. Yet, he is kept in a temperature-controlled safe in the dark to preserve him. Then too, along the way, the author gives us "side-bars" of humor with episodes engaging the butler. A favorite bit of humor sneaks in when the child spies the eccentric millionaire wearing his false face disguise. This is a delightful story with a powerful impact for readers of all ages. The author weaves the story to bring a satisfying - yet, surprise ending. This book leaves me with a "warm and fuzzy" feeling.

With the help of wonderful illustrations and great storytelling ability, you can truly feel this wonderful teddy bear's loneliness and his ecstatic bliss of finally being loved...really loved. Besides the cute story on the surface, there is an underlying message about how being too materialistic can cause us to miss out on much of life's true rewards. It's a book for children of all ages!!

I read this book way back in the dark ages -- early 1980s -- when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky. It was great -- a bent, lunatic Thousand And One Nights sort of thing. I can't believe this is out of print. What on earth is this world coming to?

Night Book is a primer of sexual & cultural variations edited with a Cuisinart®. Loose ends have been carefully grafted and continuity has been simulated. You'll learn a lot and be entertained more

It must be 20 years ago that I first happened on this uncommonly good book and I still remember it vividly, and recommend it frequently. The simplest of stories: a much-awaited first child, a stillbirth, and the aftermath for the young parents, but the telling--poetic, haunting, near-perfect, one of the finest modern novellas of loss, grief and transcendance. Buy two--you'll want to give one to a friend.

This beautiful book is a lasting testament to the failed pregnancy of a simple and poetic couple. A thin book, but as profound as it is brief. It's the kind of book that makes you want to force it into a friend's hand and watch his/her face as they silently read it. I can't imagine a more moving account or a more glistening example of bravery than this.

Probably one of the greatest books i've ever read. the way Will makes a whole world of bugs come to life and the way Joe draws the bugs looks like they're real.

The collection of stories is about a Sherlock Holmes type Praying Mantis and his side-kick Dr. Hopper(a lot like watson.) Mantis likes to go on adventures and Hopper likes to cook and eat. When the detectives aren't at home they're somewhere int he bug world.

You should buy it ...

This book was excellent! IF you like the Sherlock Holmes kind of mystery stuff, than you'll love this book. I liked this book so much because it's really easy to get into. It's lots of fun to read because you can try to solve the mysteries yourself. I learned how to be observant when trying to solve problems. I also learned to never give up, even when things aren't going your way, to stick through thing till the end. I rate this book a five, on a sclae from one to five. I gave "Trouble In Bugland" such a high rating because I found that this book kept me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. I also found it very interesting how Inspector Mantis solved his mysteries so accurately and he didn't stop trying to solve them until he found a solution to them. I recommend "Trouble In Bugland" to readers who like to solve mysteries and like to pick up a book and not putr it down until the end, because you won't want to!

Wes Craven describes how your mind can trick you and how you end mixing it up with reality. A great book for who likes pure horror. Also the best from all three sequences. Claudia Cox

I've never had the experience of meeting a person like Horse Badorties. Coming form a culture like mine.. I read almost half of the book to get an idea of what's going on, I read all the reviews too. I enjoyed reading it. And what amazed me most is Kotzwinkle's ability to register all this confusion in a person's mind. I thought it funny, interesting, new to me.. the confusion puzzled me

I first read this book when I was about nine or ten. My mom and older sisters had already dog-eared our copy and finally saw fit to pass it down to me. I read it, laughed uproarously, and wasn't aware of 90% of the culture, drug, or sexual references in the book. I still found it funny enough to read repeatedly throughout middle adn high school, and throughout college and graduate. Of course, as I got older, I understood more and more and found The Fan Man to be as sad as it was funny.

Horse Badorties is a loser who knows he's a loser and this makes his life that much more poignant, hilarious, and pathetic. He's on the fast track going nowhere and intends to enjoy every moment of it. He's the burnout hippie who hasn't escaped his languishing identity; he's capable of great things, but never follows through. He's a skilled musician, a magnetic group leader, and a charismatic con artist, yet never takes himself seriously enough to achieve the bliss he's looking for -- until he gives up his main ambition to watch the sunset over the Hudson River.

Like the sunset, his contentment is also short lived and leads inevitably to his perpetual dark dissatisfaction with everything he does (with the exception of his girl's choir). Yet I still find myself laughing at him and with him. Every time I read this book.

This is one of the greatest books ever written. Every word, line, page, image hits true. I read it back when it first came out & have since given away a couple dozen copies. Like so many others in this thread when I reread it I am hit anew by the force of its humor & pure writing. Horse Badorties LIVES, MAN!!! He is a TRUE ORIGINAL right up there with Huck & Ahab (& you & me, man). Wow!!

Perhaps this is the story Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have penned were he apprehended at a circus performance and dispatched straight to his typewriter. Fata Morgana is a solid mystery with fantasy elements that elevate it from sleuth versus villain into an enigmatic and elusive tale tinged with Gypsy mystery, parlor games and extortionist magic.

Inspector Picard, career descending and body weight ascending, is on the trail of Ric Lazare who is bilking high-society members out of considerable cash. Ric Lazare possesses a machine that foretells the future, but this alone does not explain his hold on those in his circle of influence. Picard investigates with the intention of exposing the salon scam of a medium and his costly advice, instead, he encounters the unknown - Black Magic, Grand Bewitching, the creations of a German toy maker, and a nagging foreshadowing of events, particularly his own demise. Picard's sleuthing takes him through Nuremberg, Budapest and Old-World Paris and everything Picard discovers lays in shadows, echoes and reflections. Discovering the background and identity of Ric Lazare (and his stunning wife, Renee, who has Paris bewitched) is what keeps the reader turning the pages. Clues come from:

1.) The mysterious death a priest. 2.) A half-Paleolithic family on a one-way forest trail somewhere on the steppes of Eastern Hungary. 3.) A hashish smoking Chief of Police. (The smoke is rather strong...occasionally it renders me unconscious.) 4.) A gifted toy maker, his evil apprentice, and ultimately the toys themselves, which are "much finer than men and much worse." 5.) A library in Paris where a volume of century old letters and diary excerpts reveal the true, yet impossible, identity of Ric Lazare and his wife Renee.

Kotzwinkle adds amusing sensuality to his descriptions of Nineteenth century Paris. (1861) What other capital would throw a party for the Great Whores of the City? The description of this party and the sauced satyr, Count Cherubini, who hosts it are worth the read alone. Extravagant debauchery Old-World style.

Kotzwinkle includes several zestful scenes between Inspector Picard and the ladies - a prostitute, an enchantress, and a woman in a tavern whom he seduces by hiring a gypsy Cymbolom player to envelop her in aural foreplay. Picard is quite the ladies man and these scenes show that while he may be an old dog, the learning of new tricks isn't necessary if the old ones are masterfully performed!

-- if you cannot enjoy this book, you're already old.

... in 1861, Detective Paul Picard, of the Paris Police, is hot on the trail of Baron Mantes, who has a penchant for murdering young wmoen and leaving their decapitated bodies at the scene of the crime. Recovering from his most recent run-in with the Baron, from which Picard emerges decidedly the worse for wear, he attends a party given by a wealthy and mysterious immigrant named Ric Lazare, of dubious origins, and his fabulously beautiful wife, Renee Lazare. The party is attended by all of upper-class Paris and the draw is a fortune-telling machine which holds all the guests mesmerized. Invited into a private room which holds the famous machine, Picard finds himself hurled headlong into a web of gypsy magic, murder, seduction and mystery that leads him through Germany to Austria, the Hungarian steppes, and back to Paris, to confront his fate before the fortune telling machine. His fortune, Fata Morgana, is, like Ric and Renee Lazare, a shimmering mirage, irresistable, unknowable, and ultimately unreachable; one can only accept it as it is. Kotzwinkle has woven a magical story that holds us entranced to the very last page.