The Chronicles of Harris Burdick

Since 1984, the 14 titled and captioned drawings in Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick -- ostensibly the work of a mysterious illustrator who left them with a publisher and vanished, never to be seen again -- have been used (by teachers and others) to induce imaginative storytelling. Evocative, surreal, sometimes sinister -- an ocean liner barging into a Venetian canal, an airborne nun in a chair -- these things call for explanation. In 1993, Stephen King wrote a story about the house blasting off from its foundation; since then 13 other authors, including Van Allsburg himself, took on the remaining images. Lemony Snicket contributed the foreword to this collection, waffling mightily as to whether the stories were in fact the work of the mysterious Burdick himself.