Bøker av Brian Sutton-Smith

The Folkstories of Children, first published in 1981, features nearly five hundred stories that were volunteered by fifty children between the ages of two and ten and transcribed word for word. The stories are organized chronologically by age of the teller, revealing the progression of the children's cognition and verbal competence.

Is play an adaptation that teaches us skills and inducts us into communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess, or fate, deployed in games of chance, or daydreaming, enacted in art? Sutton-Smith considers each possibility as framed in disciplines ranging from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology.