Author

Paul Fleischman

Paul Fleischman
  • It is December 1681, and the words of Mr. Baggot, the tithingman, terrify young William. William is living a strange double life. By day he is a printer's apprentice living in a white man's house. By night, he is Weetasket of the Narraganset tribe who must risk Baggot's wrath to search for his lost brother. Then comes the winter celebration of the Saturnalia—the ancient Roman holiday on which masters and slaves trade roles. Will William's secrets be revealed? And what dark deeds of others will be brought to light on this fateful night?

  • Mothers give birth in the borning room. The dying take their departure there. Outside the Lott family's Ohio farmhouse, the Civil War rages, slavery falls, and the world marvels at the wonder of electricity. Inside, within the walls of the borning room, Georgina Lott will experience her life's greatest turnings. Across the years, she discovers womanhood and first love, experiences the mourning that comes with loss, and, as did her mother and grandmother, at last takes her place in the room as another precious life is about to begin.

  • Welcome to Cliffside High, the school of your nightmares. It's run by the Huns, a ruthless clique of rich students—and, as poor Charity Chase discovers, messing with them can be murder. There's Tiffany, avid reader of every beauty magazine available; Brooke, desperate for a date; Danielle, Al Capone in Miss America's body, with her sights set firmly on a millionaire's son Drew.

    Unfortunately, like every other boy at Cliffside, Drew only has eyes for Helga, the ravishing new student from Norway … wherever that may be. As far as Danielle is concerned, Helga could be from another world. In fact, if she doesn't lay off Drew—she just might be. Getting rid of her ought to be as easy as taking candy off a helpless old lady. Only something weird is happening to Danielle and her friends, something much nastier than the horror stories she loves to read, something that can only be described as a fate totally worse than death.

  • Seventeen-year-old Olivia hasn’t seen her father since she was eight months old. But when he summons her out of the blue, Olivia travels cross country to New Hampshire to meet him. That summer, she learns to adapt to rural life and to try to understand her reclusive father. The next summer, following high school graduation, she returns to recreate her father’s seventy-mile annual bike ride—reflecting on her own personal journey to understand the true meaning of love and kinship.

    When Olivia is summoned by her father, a man she barely remembers, to determine whether she is worthy of inheriting his legacy, she embarks on a personal odyssey that teaches her the true meaning of love and kinship.

  • Sixteen voices—not the heroes, not those who would become eulogized in history books and synonymous with the glory of war. No, these are the voices of the common soldiers and their leaders, their families, their comrades. North/South, white/black, adult/child—a disparate and compelling choir of voices. Newbery Medal winner Paul Fleischman has written a tour de force that lends itself perfectly to multivoiced narration. From eager eleven-year-old Toby Boyce to Colonel Oliver Brattle, who has seen it all and knows the true face of war, these many voices are skillfully woven together—creating an intimate tapestry of naïveté, broken dreams, and carnage that transports the listener to the front lines of the Battle of Bull Run. Paul Fleischman makes an appearance as the voice of James Dacy and concludes this unique production with a personal author’s note—allowing us to glimpse into his beginnings as a writer, as well as how Bull Run came to be written.

  • Paul Fleischman is a master of sound, incorporating a soaring, energetic musicality into his writing. His poems for two voices—"Joyful Noise" and "I Am Phoenix"—make for irresistible listening. Whether funny, sad, boisterous, or serene, each poem is a virtuoso performance, skillfully illuminating a unique personality from the natural world.

  • A vacant lot, rat-infested, and filled with garbage, looked like no place for a garden. Especially to a neighborhood of strangers where no one seems to care. Until one day, a young girl clears a small space and digs into the hard-packed soil to plant her precious bean seeds. Suddenly, the soil holds promise: to Curtis, who believes he can win back Lateesha's heart with a harvest of tomatoes; to Virgil's dad, who sees a fortune to be made from growing lettuce; and even to Maricela, sixteen and pregnant, wishing she were dead. Thirteen very different voices—old, young, Haitian, Hispanic, tough, haunted, and hopeful tell one amazing story about a garden that transforms a neighborhood.
  • New to town, Brent Bishop longs to stroll around school with the popular Brianna on his arm. But when Brianna begs him at a party full of schoolmates to stop hounding her, Brent’s hopes are shattered. Trying to escape his humiliation, he attempts to destroy himself in a car crash—and ends up killing Lea, an innocent teen unfortunate enough to cross his path. Lea’s mother asks one thing of Brent: that he create four whirligigs from a picture of Lea and set them up at the four corners of the United States. Lea’s mother believes that by spreading the joy that whirligigs gave Lea as a child, Brent will keep Lea’s spirit alive. And so Brent goes off with an unlimited bus ticket and the tools he needs to memorialize Lea. On his journey, he rediscovers his own love of life, and he begins to realize how—like the pieces that form the intricate whirligigs—people come together to affect each other in surprising ways.