For many of the characters in these inventive tales, the past is disturbing, while the present is strange and vivid.

"Well now, this is an inventive tale!"

In Mr. Gross's inventive tale, both fall for a rakish count named Alexis (Jonathan Kells Phillips), who, when the play begins in 1774, is emerging as an aristocratic advocate for the masses.

The adolescent characters who populate these inventive tales somehow manage to be both quirky and down to earth despite the broken adult relationships around them.

What one of Mr. Barthelme's listeners wants, she says while gobbling junk food and hearing an old-fashioned, inventive tale, is the "really real."

On the surface, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is a lively, wonderfully inventive comic tale with an updated Arabian Nights background.

Tarchetti adapted fantastic motifs, reproduced scenes, translated sentences, even, as we now know, plagiarized - yet these strategies resulted in strikingly inventive tales that addressed pressing social issues in Italy.

In a 2008 article, Dunning calls their story "merely an inventive tale from the mind of a lifelong UFO fanatic.

This highly inventive, blackly humorous tale, told entirely in rhymed couplets, was written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch and published in 1865.

It's not that Powers's endlessly inventive tale doesn't hold together; it's just that you might enjoy it more if you don't sweat all the metaphysical details.