For today's western Africa post, I want to feature two more Anansi books, both by famous children's book authors that I've featured in earlier posts at this blog. The first is Verna Aardema, with her book Anansi Does the Impossible: An Ashanti Tale.
The story originally appeared in Aardema's book The Sky God Stories (also available at Internet Archive), and when that book went out of print and the rights reverted to Aardema, she republished this individual story with illustrations by Lisa Desimini. Here is Anansi preparing for the task of capturing Snake alive, for example:
I've featured MANY of Verna Aardema's African folktale books in previous posts, and you can see all those Aardema posts with this link.
The other book I want to feature today is Gerald McDermott's Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti.
Gerald McDermott wrote and illustrated children's books featuring folktales and mythology from around the world; you can find out more about his career and his mythological pursuits at Wikipedia. This book was his first, published in 1972, and it received a Caldecott Honor award.
McDermott's style of storytelling is very spare, and the beautiful illustrations do a lot of the work here... and what's really fascinating is that the copy of the book at Internet Archive has annotations! Someone has pasted in their own additions to the story right there in the text, as you can see here for example when Anansi emerges from inside a fish: "Out came Anansi, all wet and wobbly."
You can also see more of McDermott's books at Internet Archive. I featured McDermott's book about the African trickster rabbit in an earlier post: Zomo the Rabbit: A Trickster Tale from West Africa.
I am a fan of all the trickster, but especially Rabbit, since it was my fascinating with African American Brer Rabbit stories that led me to begin this African folktale project to begin with. So, both Rabbit and Spider await you at Internet Archive!
by Gerald McDermott
by Verna Aardema
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