There are places where it wanders into rhyme and out again. It's like it's written by somebody who wants to infect you with his love of words. ' - Daniel Pinkwater, Weekend Edition, NPR 'Everyone who reads to their children knows.to read the stuff that you love, or that you love to roll off your tongue.I'd put in a personal endorsement for James Thurber's The 13 Clocks here.' - The Guardian 'There has never been anything like this before, and there will never be anything like this again. ' - Los Angeles Times ' The 13 Clocks, first published in 1950, still deserves its reputation as a modern classic, and ranks as one of Thurber's finest works.Thurber pioneers the postmodern, ironic fairy story.' - Publishers Weekly 'If you like The Princess Bride you're going to like. It's certainly the most fun that anybody can have reading anything aloud.' - Neil Gaiman '.an eccentric children's story that took apart and lovingly reconstructed the fairy tale long before William Steig wrote Shrek or William Goldman penned The Princess Bride. It may be the best thing Thurber ever wrote. 'It's one of the great kids' books of the last century. 'Mine is being wicked' ), while wondering at the enigmatic Golux, the mysterious stranger whose unpredictable interventions speed the story to its necessarily happy end. Readers young and old will take pleasure in this tale of love forestalled but ultimately fulfilled, admiring its upstanding hero ( 'who yearned to find in a far land the maiden of his dreams, singing as he went.and possibly slaying a dragon here and there' ) and unapologetic villain ( 'We all have flaws,' the Duke said. So begins James Thurber's sublimely revamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks, in which a wicked Duke who imagines he has killed time, and the Duke's beautiful niece, for whom time seems to have run out, both meet their match, courtesy of an enterprising and very handsome prince in disguise.

He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart.

She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. Now in paperback Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda.

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber