You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you are indebted for your food, and for the privilege of staying home from school when you let on that you are sick. Therefore you ought to respect their little prejudices, and humor their little whims, and put up with their little foibles until they get to crowding you too much.

When Mark Twain wrote the sparky short story "Advice to Little Girls" in 1865, he probably didn''t mean for it to be shown to them. Or maybe he did, since we all know Twain was a rascal. Now, author and illustrator Vladimir Radunsky has created a picture book based on Twain''s text that adds all the right outlandish touches.

Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. He wrote two major classics of American literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur, and inventor. Whether or not it was Mark Twain''s actual intention for little girls to read this humorous short story, it''s clear that he did not talk down to children, but rather expected them to stretch themselves in order to grasp sophisticated, adult meaning.

Vladimir Radunsky has illustrated many books to great acclaim. Recently, Radunsky has been moving farther and farther away from the traditional picture book and into other more innovative forms. The most recent example is a work published by HarperCollins of hip-hop poetry for children, where the graffiti art has migrated from the walls into a printed book. Radunsky has published more than thirty books for children, mostly in the United States. Many of them were translated and published in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.