Pyle knew his stories were built on older tales. He loved them for it, and I loved him for it.

Nowhere is he more open about his stories’ roots and inspiration than in Twilight Land. His many narrators, all gathered at the Inn of the Sign of Mother Goose, are his handpicked favorites from around the world. And they each tell tales of their own particular flavor.

Twilight Land is a playful assortment of adventures. It is layered. Narration within narration, fantasy within fantasy, all filtered through Pyle’s own clever and folksy American voice. Genies and beggars and woodcutters. Princesses who inspire and princesses who bewitch. Kings and wizards, quests and betrayals and misunderstandings. Pyle climbs inside characters who have captured imaginations through centuries, and he lets them speak. He lets them laugh and cheer each other on as they listen and wait their turns, as they revel in Story.

Find a chair. Scoot closer to this rowdy group and listen from the shadows. It won’t cost you anything. Not even that feathered cap you took from the demon bird. Join in. Read. Lose yourself in the Twilight Land.

N. D. Wilson
Author of 100 Cupboards

I FOUND myself in Twilight Land. How I ever got there I cannot tell, but there I was in Twilight Land.

What is Twilight Land? It is a wonderful, wonderful place where no sun shines to scorch your back as you jog along the way, where no rain falls to make the road muddy and hard to travel, where no wind blows the dust into your eyes or the chill into your marrow. Where all is sweet and quiet and ready to go to bed.

Where is Twilight Land? Ah! that I cannot tell you. You will either have to ask your mother or find it for yourself.

There I was in Twilight Land. The birds were singing their good-night song, and the little frogs were piping “peet, peet.” The sky overhead was full of still brightness, and the moon in the east hung in the purple gray like a great bubble as yellow as gold. All the air was full of the smell of growing things. The high-road was gray, and the trees were dark.

I drifted along the road as a soap-bubble floats before the wind, or as a body floats in a dream. I floated along and I floated along past the trees, past the bushes, past the mill-pond, past the mill where the old miller stood at the door looking at me.

I floated on, and there was the Inn, and it was the Sign of Mother Goose.

The sign hung on a pole, and on it was painted a picture of Mother Goose with her gray gander.

It was to the Inn I wished to come.

I floated on, and I would have floated past the Inn, and perhaps have gotten into the Land of Never-Come-Back-Again, only I caught at the branch of an apple tree, and so I stopped myself, though the apple blossoms came falling down like pink and white snowflakes.

The earth and the air and the sky were all still, just as it is at twilight, and I heard them laughing and talking in the tap-room of the Inn of the Sign of Mother Goose—the clinking of glasses, and the rattling and clatter of knives and forks and plates and dishes. That was where I wished to go.

So in I went. Mother Goose herself opened the door, and there I was.

The room was all full of twilight; but there they sat, every one of them. I did not count them, but there were ever so many: Aladdin, and Ali Baba, and Fortunatus, and Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and Dr. Faustus, and Bidpai, and Cinderella, and Patient Grizzle, and the Soldier who cheated the Devil, and St.