response 39 of 104:

Jul 10 04:40 UTC 2001

I knocked and waited.  I knocked again.  My heart was imitating my fist. 
 What if my father answered the door?  After a while I heard footsteps 
and the sound of a peephole opening.  A tall white-haired man, with a 
huge white moustache that curled up at the ends, opened the door.

"Hello," he boomed Swissly.

"Hi," I said. "I'm looking for somebody."

"Who are you looking for?"  He twirled the end of his moustache around 
his finger and glowered at me.

"Irving Rose," I said.

The man's blue eyes looked like they were doing a jig and the rest of 
his body seemed like it would follow any second.  His cheeks turned 
pinker.  "You know Irving Rose!  The genius!  I haven't seen him in 
years."

"He used to live here?"  I asked.

"Yes he did.  In this very apartment.  I moved in when he left."

"Who are you?"  I asked.

"The landlord, Uncle Hansel," the man said.  He bowed so low that I was 
afraid his moustache would tickle me.  Instead all that happened was I 
got a little dizzy from his cologne.  Then he put out his big hand and I 
shook it.  I tried to see behind him, into the apartment where my father 
used to live.

"Could I come in?"  I asked.

"Didn't anyone tell you that children shouldn't go into the apartments 
of strange men!"  Uncle Hansel scolded.

"You're not strange," I reassured him, still trying to see.

"Well, all right, but we'll leave the door wide open and you must run 
out if you feel in the least uncomfortable, dear," Uncle Hansel 
insisted.

I followed him to a small, dim room that smelled of rye bread and 
strawberry jam.  It was filled with wooden furniture carved and painted 
with hearts and flowers.  There were jars of roses, ferns in birdcages, 
a collection of mechanical windup toys and as many cuckoo clocks as 
could fit on the walls.  As I looked at them, they all started chiming, 
and a flock of wooden cuckoos scooted in and out.  I wondered if that 
drove Uncle Hansel crazy, but he seemed to be enjoying it.  He smiled 
proudly at the birds and twirled his moustache.

"Would you like something to eat?"  Uncle Hansel asked.  "Although, come 
to think of it, little girls aren't supposed to accept food from 
strangers."

"You knew my father, though," I said.  I was hungry, and I had a pretty 
good sense of smell -- I bet there really would be rye bread and jam.

"Your father!"  Uncle Hansel exclaimed.  "Why of course!  The genius!  
You look just like him!"

"So could I maybe have a snack?" I asked.

"Of course.  Come with me."

response 41 of 104:

Jul 11 14:58 UTC 2001

I'll guess Bruce Coville.  Probably wrong, but it seems like the same 
writing style.

response 43 of 104:

Jul 13 04:09 UTC 2001

Here's a quote from another novel (resp:36 is from one of this author's 
novels, resp:34 and resp:39 from a short story):

She hardly recognized him because she knew he didn't recognize her, not 
at all.  Once, on a bus in New York, she had seen the man of her dreams. 
 She was twelve and he was carrying a guitar case and roses wrapped in 
green paper, and there were raindrops on the roses and on his hair, and 
he hadn't looked at her once.  He was sitting directly across from her 
and staring ahead and he didn't see anyone, anything there.  He didn't 
see Weetzie even though she had known then that someday they must have 
babies and bring each other roses and write songs together and be rock 
stars.  Her heart had felt as meager as her twelve-year-old chest, as if 
it had shriveled up because this man didn't recognize her.

response 45 of 104:

Jul 16 01:25 UTC 2001

The usual solution to this is to start giving really honking big clues.  But
you can just throw it up for whoever wants to go next if you like.

response 47 of 104:

Jul 19 13:00 UTC 2001

Sara- well, since you've declared the field open... who is that author 
anyway?

response 49 of 104:

Jul 20 04:30 UTC 2001

Francesca Lia Block is correct.  The first and third of the quotes I
posted are from the short story "Dragons in Manhattan."  The second is
from _I Was a Teenage Fairy_ and the latest from _Weetzie Bat_.

Block is, as I said, generally shelved in the young adult section of
bookstores.  Don't let that dissuade you from checking her stuff out.
She's cool.

response 51 of 104:

Jul 20 16:04 UTC 2001

_Weetzie Bat_? Is that about a bat (chiroptera)?

response 53 of 104:

Jul 21 21:30 UTC 2001

I hope this will be  an easy one:

At dawn, bleary-eyed but joyful, the three youngsters took off
across the wet dewy fields and went into the woods to the brook
among the pines, where they had done the old swimming as little
kids. And just as they got there the sun began to come up, the
mists stirred over the hillsides and over the placid brook, birds
peeped in the pines, the last pale stars trembled, and great light
began to overspread the world.

"Rosy-fingered dawn!" howled young Panos with indescribable
delight, and they were all awake now, strangely ecstatic, and each
began to sing, babble, and wander around in the woods throwing
sticks, Alexander himself singing in a loud bawling voice that might
have been heard two miles away in the profound stillness. He even
ran tripping to the top of a little hill, yelling joyous hosannahs
and holding out his arms to the sky, while Peter and Tommy
watched him, amazed.

Peter, for his part, kept looking up at the sky and yelling
"Space!" or down in the water with a show of moodiness, saying
"Lucidness," or stamping his feet on the ground and repeating over
and over again, "Solidness, solidness, solidness," though he hadn't
the vaguest idea why he enjoyed doing this. And Tommy Camp-
bell, flinging his tunic over his shoulder in the warm morning,
began to sing in a high cracked voice. On the Road to Mandalay,
which echoed and re-echoed in the woods, especially when Panos
lent his own thunderous voice' to the refrain. They felt wonder-
fully foolish and happy and they let go with anything that came
to their minds.

"Because the sun is coming up!" howled Alexander. "Only be-
cause the sun is coming up! We came here just for that!"

"We thronged!" shouted Peter triumphantly.

"Yes! Through the woods!" bawled Alexander. "Oh, listen to
me! Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, and that is all ye need
to know!"

"Chambers of beauty!" cried Tommy Campbell, pointing to the
rays of light streaming down between the pines.

"God's cathedral-l-l!" called Alexander through cupped hands in
a great shout that carried across the fields, and they all laughed
savagely.

Then, as the sun came up in full brilliant array far off over the
hills, fanning light all over the sky and gilding little dawn-clouds
that were regimented beautifully overhead, the boys fell silent, in
awe, and stood on the two little hills watching, Panos and Camp-
bell on one hill, and Peter alone on another, all of them brooding
and reflective. It was a strange little moment of meditation in the
deep stillness of the morning, with only the sound of a farmer's
horse neighing faintly far away and clip-clopping on a road, and
someone whistling far away, and a barndoor closing.

They trudged back home wearily, after a quick shivering swim
in the brook where Alexander splashed about prodigiously, scream-
ing: "Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo and all of the other Gods
of the Congo!" Now, their meditations over as whimsically as they
had begun, they jabbered excitedly all the way home; Alexander
wound a flower around his ear. Peter chewed the stems of long
grass, and Tommy strode along like a prophet, carrying a huge
limb from a rotted tree. They happened to see two veiled old
ladies trudging along the road, apparently towards the church in
Norcott, two darkly-clad old women faithful to some endless
novena. Peter pointed at them with the air of a prophet, saying:
"Fear." Alexander went into a little dance that was intended to
represent fear, and Tommy Campbell raised his huge tree-bough
and waved it thrice in solemn blessing.

They strode on home eagerly, hungrily. Alexander cried: "Up
there!" and they all stopped. Alexander was pointing at the sky,
saying: "Glory!" They all stared up at the sky.

"Here!" cried Tommy Campbell, pointing to the ground at his
feet. "Death!"

Alexander knelt on the ground and tenderly took the flower from
his ear, and laid it down, and covered it with a little bier of earth,
his whole body, meanwhile, seeming to tremble suddenly from
some spasmodic feeling.

"What's left of life," he said mournfully, "what's left of life, a
little flower. Immortal little flower that venerates us, that venerates
us and all that this morning means. Weep for the little flower,
weep for the petals in its heart, weep for us, weep for us!" He knelt
there, while the boys watched grinning, he knelt there and seemed
to be wrapped in a secret, prescient ecstasy of what his life was to
him.                                    

And then they went on home.

response 55 of 104:

Jul 22 08:19 UTC 2001

I'll snidely throw Ray Bradbury in as my guess, since this has a style very
similar to the Pioneer 9th grade English ultra-reviled Dandelion Wine.

response 57 of 104:

Jul 22 18:03 UTC 2001

No, not C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, or Edward Eager. 

response 59 of 104:

Jul 23 15:09 UTC 2001

No, not E.M. Forster. 

response 61 of 104:

Jul 23 16:49 UTC 2001

Don't correct people who are correct, jiffer.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156711427/qid=995906815/sr=2-1/103-
375
8189-2164611

That's a link to Amazon's listing for "A Passage to India," written by Edward
Morgan Forster (with a picture of the bookcover, with the same spelling).