Childish & Curious

YES AND No STORIES (227 pp.)--George and Helen Papashvily--Harper ($2.50).

Like Joseph Stalin, George Papashvily was born in Russia's Georgia. Then they became quite unalike: Joseph entered politics, George entered the U.S. In 1945, the Book-of-the-Month Club selected Anything Can Happen--a whimsical, owlish account in Georgian English of George's 20 years of life as an immigrant, dictated by himself, set down by his wife, Helen. Today, Helen runs the Moby Dick Bookshop in Allentown, Pa., and George spends "part of each day at a granite quarry working on an animal figure he designed to commemorate the plight of the world during the darkest days of the German advance."

Yes and No Stories, the new Papashvily opus, is not likely to be so popular as Anything Can Happen. It consists simply of 20 folk stories that were told to George when he was a Georgia boy. The principal characters include wolves, princesses, witches and giants--none of whom seems far removed from the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen or La Fontaine, all of whom combine to give this collection a childish and curious poetry.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.