Lions, dinosaurs, & Jules Feiffer. (Children's Books).

If the Washington Square/ Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s--folksingers and coffeehouses and leotards, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag and the Village Voice--seems as romantic to some of us as Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, blame Jules Feiffer's cartoons. Those soliloquies by preening beatniks, neurotic modern dancers, dazed college students, frustrated housewives, and middle-aged swingers weren't satires etched in acid but mockeries poeticized by affection. Feiffer shook his head at the glib Freudianizing of his bohemians, but how he loved their romantic swooniness and their need to grow through sheer perversity.

The seventies and eighties soured much of Feiffer's work. In reaction to Nixon and Reagan, he appeared determined to punish all the usual right-wing suspects for all the usual left-wing reasons. A joyous artist was turning himself into a scold. Over the last decade, however, Feiffer has been doing children's books and this has revived his generosity. The characters in his new work have every right to be self-absorbed--they're kids! They are still in the process of growing up, and their outbursts of rage and self-pity and ecstasy are trial runs toward adulthood.

Though Feiffer has written two novels for children--the excellent Man in the Ceiling, a portrait of the artist as a young goof, and a humorous allegory called A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears--he is really at his uncorseted best in his picture books.

Meanwhile (HarperCollins, $14.89, 32 pp., ages 4-8) takes its title from the word comic books use to shift the action from one locale to the next. By scribbling "meanwhile," young Raymond can escape from household chores into fantasies of pirates, cowboys, spaceships. Alas, to leap from shark jaws to mountain lion claws to evaporating missiles launched by two-headed Martians, is to be stuck on a treadmill of danger and Raymond soon wants to get off.

Neither mom nor dad can help the nameless little girl whose plaint is I Lost My Bear (Morrow, $16, 32 pp., preschoolers). She's on a rollercoaster of emotion hurtling her up to an anguish worthy of Electra, then down to a depression against which Prozac could not prevail. I've shared this book many times with three- and four-year-olds, and their solidarity with the heroine is absolute, their relief at her ultimate victory cathartic.

Bark, George (HarperCollins, $14.89, 32 pp., preschoolers), commands a mother dog to her pup, who can't. George can only (only!) quack, oink, moo, and meow. A trip to a vet reveals that George's idiosyncrasies have more to do with his stomach than with his psyche. This is the Feiffer book that, when read aloud, invites the most audience participation.

Feiffer followed through with another identity crisis, I'm Not Bobby (Hyperion, $16, 32 pp., all ages), in which a boy, unwilling to respond to his mother's call, imagines himself to be a lion, a dinosaur, or anything but who he actually is. This is the book that most resembles the author's early cartooning for adults, being essentially a monologue carried out in a series of panels. Whereas those soliloquizing bohemians imploded, Bobby explodes into all the beings of his imagination.

This year's publication of By the Side of the Road (Hyperion, $15.95, 65 pp., all ages) gives us the best thing Feiffer has ever done, either for adults or for children. It's an instant American myth that begins with two brothers wrestling in the back seat of a car. So fiercely are Richard and Rudy entangled that they look like twin embryos in a womb. From behind the steering wheel their father growls, "If you don't behave ... I'm gonna pull over right here, and you can wait by the side of the road till we come and get you." Rudy capitulates but Richard calls his father's bluff.

Which is no bluff. Richard gets left by the side of the road. Misery? Bewilderment? Panic? You kidding? After all, there are "trees and stuff. A meadow. A fast-food joint no more than a half-mile back. Actually not a bad place to wait if you're gonna wait by the side of the road." Besides, when the parents return at night and start arguing with each other "about whose fault it was that I was out there," Richard has an unhappy epiphany: "They get along fine except when it's about me." The boy is so shocked that his eyes are reduced to dots in a ghostly pale, heart-shaped face: "I make them fight." So Richard decides that this is it, he's going to live the rest of his life by the side of the road.

Years pass. His decision brings him celebrity and obloquy ("A thousand cars must have stopped to bother me.... The mothers and fathers ... called me names, like `selfish.' The kids ... wanted to get out and live with me"), false friends and true love, the realization of his innate inventiveness, the envy of his brother (who heads northwest to become a techno-capitalist), a wife and children and, finally, reunion with his parents.

Filled with brilliant strokes of characterization, mini-sociology, domestic bliss, domestic hell, a grand exaltation of American individualism mitigated by a sense of family claims and mortality, this is a miniature epic that for once justifies the cliche encomium, "a book for all ages."

An even grander event in children's literature: Greenwillow Books has published the collected tales of one of England's finest writers, Philippa Pearce, under the title Haunting and Familiar ($16.89, 392 pp., ages 10 and up). The two adjectives signal the two halves of the book: "reality-based tales," and "supernatural tales." In truth, for Pearce there is no division between natural and supernatural, at least not when she is at the top of her form. There are only life and consciousness within life and currents of emotion flowing from one consciousness to another. Sometimes the currents find exceedingly odd furrows in which to flow and then we say, "Ah, a ghost story." Sometimes the currents find more predictable channels and then we say, "Ah, realism." Yet in the fictional shire of Philippa Pearce, spirits can be familiar even when horrifying us, while supposedly normal people can be goblins even when they keep their misdeeds as invisible as ghosts.

A Pearce story typically takes place in the sort of English village or farmland familiar to us from Masterpiece Theater episodes. All the adults know one another, all the kids play together, everybody thinks they know all there is to know about everybody else, until one day something happens that proves not that they were wrong about old Mr. X or young Miss Y, but that they didn't realize the degree to which they were right.

In "What the Neighbors Did," everyone in the neighborhood knows that Mr. Macy is henpecked by his wife and that the poor man won't be allowed to keep the big, yellowy-white blind dog that's wandered onto his property. They're right: he abandons the stray on the road where any car could run it over. And when Dirty Dick, the local junk dealer and all-around disgrace to humanity, takes the dog into his house, everybody knows that the mangy mutt and the mangy man are made for each other. Right again, but there's a catch. The weakness that keeps Mr. Macy henpecked and petless can curdle into resentment and the resentment can curdle into malevolence and the malevolence can be spewed at the very man who is free to do what Mr. Macy cannot. And when that malevolence results in a theft and a little boy becoming unfairly implicated in that theft, it is only the insouciance and pariah status of Dirty Dick that keeps the whole situation from blowing up into a tragedy. In Pearce's fiction, it's never individual character that is unpredictable but rather what can happen when characters collide.

"Happen"--that's a trick word in fiction where what happens can take place inside a head instead of out in the world. In some Pearce stories (and not just the ghost stories), the events are spectacular enough to satisfy the most action-craving kid: a bunch of boys place themselves in mortal danger by undertaking to pull down a giant oak without adult guidance; a jogger is pursued by the ghost of the brother he murdered; a yuppie determined to uproot a haunted grove is put in his place (and not a happy place) by an indignant dryad.

But some Pearce stories will work only for one of those "extremely intelligent children (of all ages)" to whom Harold Bloom geared his recent anthology Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (Scribner). The breezy reader of Pearce's "The Great Blackberry Pick" will tell you that nothing happens in it: a father and his children go gathering berries in the country. The daughter, Val, spills her haul, runs away from a scolding, and winds up at a small farm where the kind owners feed her, bandage her skinned knee, and get her back home. The End. Big deal. But a careful reader will gradually realize that this is a portrait of an abused child who is desperately trying to placate her abuser but can't. She catches a glimpse of family happiness with the young farmers before returning to her misery. The naked incidents don't convey this but the author's arrangement of words does. For instance, there's a constant repetition of phrases such as "you had to hand it to Dad," "Dad was right about that, too," "Dad knew his map," etc. It's as if the petty compliments had to keep flowing for fear of what would be screamed if they stopped.

So, will kids get it? A small percentage of them will, the same percentage that will go on to read ... you know, all those great writers all English teachers want them to read. By this I don't mean to imply that Philippa Pearce is just a stepping stone to great literature. She herself is a great writer, and parents benight their children by not feeding them her masterpieces, Tom's Midnight Garden, A Dog So Small, The Way to Satin Shore, Lion at School, and this magnificent collection of stories.

Another collection by a veteran and well regarded British author is Shadows and Moonshine (David R. Godine, $18.95, 171 pp., ages 10 and up) by Joan Aiken. These are the sort of tales one might hear while hanging around an English village where everyone has cable television and cell phones and lives off the tourist trade, and yet where old presentiments of the supernatural have lingered. It is typical of Aiken that when one of her heroes must communicate with the spirit of an ancestor dwelling in a wasteland, he has to take the "18.06 stopping train from Waterloo to Guildford" to do so. If, unfairly, you read this collection right after Pearce's, you may find it comparatively brittle. Indeed, Aiken is tart, tidy, and brisk. (If Alice Longworth Roosevelt had had a penchant for folklore and fairies instead of Washington high society, she would have been Joan Aiken.) So if your children lack a tart, tidy, and brisk grandmother with a fund of stories that instruct and delight, perch them on the knee of this book.

In Fox (Kane/Miller, $14.95, 32 pp., ages 6 and up), two animals come together in a friendship that we are bound to see as a marriage. Magpie has lost a wing. Dog has lost an eye. And so they run together, the author Margaret Wild tells us, "with Magpie clinging to his back. He runs so swiftly, it is almost as if he were flying. Magpie feels the wind streaming through her feathers and she rejoices. `Fly, Dog, Fly! I will be your missing eye, and you will be my wings.'"

That's where most picture books would end. But, alas, Dog is only almost flying through what looks like the Australian outback as rendered in Ron Brooks's marvelous pictures. Enter Fox, "with his smell of rage and envy and loneliness," who keeps whispering, "I can run faster than Dog. Faster than the wind. Leave Dog and come with me." Is it necessary to add that the illicit ride ends badly? Abandoned in a wilderness, the bird hears a parting cry from her seducer: "She cannot tell if it is a scream of triumph or despair." Because of her love for Dog, Magpie survives, but the last image of hopefulness is bruised by the echo of Fox's scream.

Is this a story for children? Well, is the story of Cain and Abel for children? Is the story of the Crucifixion for children? I learned them both at the age of five and have (perhaps) survived. This book, while certainly not for toddlers, is for anyone who can deal with it, thrill to it, absorb it. Read this masterpiece before your children do, then read it with them. It won't inoculate them against the shocks that life holds in store, but emotional wisdom between the boards of any kind of book is too precious to miss.

The destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis has by now become as perennial a feature of children's literature as of adults. In Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Camps by Andrea Warren (HarperCollins, $16.98, 146 pp., ages 11 and up), all of the atrocious facts are certified by the sheer normalcy of the book's protagonist. Jack Mandelbaum, who is now seventy-five and the founder of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, led a perfectly normal childhood in prewar Poland, and the fondly recalled incidents--the taste of "sweet fried pastry with pockets of jelly inside," the mischievous swims in Gdynia's harbor while the port police scold, the Christmas caroling alongside blithely accepting Catholic friends--concretely convey to young readers exactly what was obliterated by the Nazis. The book is filled with helpful photographs, but the fact that so many of them are of families similar to Jack's rather than his own implicitly darkens an already dark story, for not only was Jack's childhood ended by Hitler, most of the visual evidence of it was burned to ashes.

Two interesting novels for the upper grades: Loser by Jerry Spinelli (HarperCollins, $15.89, 218 pp., ages 11 and up) is an amazing book. While never ceasing to be a first-rate novel, it is also a sort of anthropological study of the pecking order that kids arrange among themselves. The focus is on the target of the pecking, Zinkoff, who makes teachers roll their eyes up at the ceiling and classmates groan. The author regards Zinkoff never as a case suitable for treatment, but as a specialty number by God suitable for celebration.

In trying to describe Coraline by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, $17.89, 163 pp., ages 11 to early senility, which might be brought on prematurely by the shock of reading this book), I'm tempted to call it a cross between Through the Looking Glass and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That would be fair enough as far as the plot goes, in which the heroine battles a preternatural, soul-snatching force in an alternative, mirror-image world. The writing is in the great British ghost story tradition, using delicate understatement and tidy realism to lower the reader's guard so that sheer terror can deliver several blows to the solar plexus. Buy this book for Halloween, 2003, gather the kids after the trick-or-treating is done, dim the lights, read in a hushed voice ...

Richard Alleva is Commonweal's "Culture Watch" columnist, and assistant head of children's services at Russell Library in Middletown, Connecticut.