The Painted Wall and Other Strange Tales by Michael Bedard

This is a delightful fairy tale book of stories told long before the Brothers Grimm started making them up. They are selected and adapted from the Liao-Chai which was written by a scholar in China, Pu Sung-ling. He used oral and written sources and gathered together almost five hundred stories.

The Painted Wall is 109 pages and contains only a few of these tales, but they're fascinating. Ghosts, fox fairies and other wordly creatures walk through these stories very comfortably.

This would be an excellent book for read aloud (let the children act out the parts). They are also short enough for storytelling.

Tundra published this book, and it's a real treasure. I highly recommend it.