What's the Hurry, Fox? 
And Other Animal Stories 
By Zora Neale Hurston

     What's the Hurry, Fox? is a picture book of anthropomorphic folklore adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas from Zora Neale Hurston’s Every Tongue Got to Confess. As the inside cover blurb states, Ms Hurston collected the stories during the thirties and forties “so that the spirit and tradition of the oral storytelling tradition could be shared and preserved.” Interesting for armchair cultural anthropologists, the names of the original sources are not lost to history, but attributed on the title page. It is an impressive variety of voices.

    These are the Aesop’s fables of the rural South, each titled by the issue it explains: Why the buzzard has no home; why the porpoise’s tail is on crosswise; why the dog hates the cat. Each of the eight stories is short and easy, yet employs a distinctive southern story-telling voice and is cleverly concluded with the ninth.

     There is a striking range to Bryan Collier’s colorful watercolor collages that reflects the individuality of each story. Based on the U.S. postage stamp by artist Drew Struzan, which is based on a 1934 photograph taken by Carl Van Vechten, Collier’s back cover portrait of Zora Neale Hurston is as contemporary and timeless as the stories contained within. This is the book you will be reading to your preschoolers every night from the age of two to four; and from the age of four on, they will be reading it back to you.