Six hundred pages of provender for the snowbound, shipwrecked or flooded-in family in the form of an anthology of the best of both worlds: recent juvenile and adult literature. Most of the ""short stories"" are excerpts, and not an are fiction; the loose topical arrangement encompasses startling juxtapositions (E. B. White following Scott Fitzgerald, Esther Forbes after Dylan Thomas) but almost all share one common quality: style. There's no escaping a representative listing: selections from My Name is Aram, Harriet the Spy, Good-bye Mr. Chips, Five Children and It, An Episode of Sparrows, The Moon Is Down, Mr. Wilmer, How Green Was My Valley, It's Like This, Cat; also short stories by Graham Greene, Lin Yutang, Truman Capote, Thurber, Chekhov, Joyce Cary, Hemingway; also parts of Sandburg's Abe Lincoln Grows Up, Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, Durrell's Three Tickets to Adventure; etc.; not to mention Mary Renault, Aubrey Menen, Mary Norton, Sean O'Faolain, Ray Bradbury, Sholokov, Tolkien. . . . The idea, of course, is cross-fertilization, and, considering the unhackneyed excellence of many and the universality of most, it just might work. Attractive chapter headings supply the right quotient of illustration.