Description

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From the author of The Neverending Story, a book that reminds us that “magic—be it good or bad—is no simple matter.”

It's New Year’s Eve at the Villa Nightmare but Beelzebub Preposteror is in no mood for celebration. As the Shadow Sorcery Minister, Preposteror has a duty to perform a certain number of evil deeds in service to the Minister of Pitch Darkness. But this year, to his horror, he’s nowhere near meeting that quota. Preposteror has all but given up when who should make an unexpected visit but his aunt, the witch Tyrannia Vampirella. She has come with a diabolical proposal that just might be the solution to Preposterer’s dilemma: together they will brew the fabled Notion Potion, “one of the most ancient and powerful evil spells in the universe,” and their every evil wish will be granted.

The only thing that stands in their way is a most unlikely team—a cat named Mauricio di Mauro and a raven known as Jacob Scribble, who have just hours to thwart the plans of their sorcerer masters and save the world from destruction.

About the Author

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Michael Ende (1929–1995) was born into an artistic family in Bavaria, Germany. As a young man during the Second World War, he joined the anti-Nazi resistance rather than enlist in the army, as his teenage classmates were then being required to do. After the war, he finished high school and enrolled in drama school, hoping for a career as a playwright and actor. For the next few years he worked in regional theater and wrote plays and cabaret scripts. He also met his future wife, the actor Ingeborg Hoffmann. Ende found surprise success with the 1960 publication of his first children’s book, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. He would go on to write many plays, essays, poems, and books—including Momo (1973) and The Neverending Story (1979)—which have been translated into more than forty languages and sold millions of copies around the world. He lived with his first wife in Italy for sixteen years until her death, and traveled extensively in Japan with his second wife, Mariko Satō, who was also his Japanese translator.

Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian have collaborated on two translations of books by the German literary critic and novelist Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day’s News and What Remains and Other Stories.

Regina Kehn has illustrated editions of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, as well as books by Michael Ende, Daniil Kharms, Cornelia Funke, Otfried Preussler, and Franz Kafka, among others. She is based in Hamburg, Germany.

Praise For…

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"Good confronts evil in a comic adventure spiced with rambunctious wordplay and deepened by allusions to the world’s real afflictions. Clever and highly imaginative." —Kirkus Reviews

"A potent dose of comic fantasy, bubbling over with clever wordplay and slapstick incidents, and spiked with verse." —Publishers Weekly

“Envy the parents who get to read it aloud at bedtime, facing the challenge of voicing larger-than-life characters…Ende revels in zany details and little asides. The tone of amused horror is well sustained in this playful translation…Amid the gags comes meaning, particularly when a cat arrives at a new understanding of his life, and when we witness the destruction of nature. It all ends in an operatic aria. And why not? Michael Ende also likes to keep his readers thinking.” —Eileen Battersby, TLS