NEW YORK -- An odd but hopeful picture book about a lovable lost creature has a new life in the United States to go with its Oscar-winning, 15-minute movie.

The Academy Award victory in the short animated film category for Australian Shaun Tan's "The Lost Thing" coincides with its release this month in "Lost & Found," a collection of three stories primarily by Tan from the Scholastic imprint Arthur A. Levine Books.

Tan, 37, co-directed the movie and was only 25 when he wrote and drew "The Lost Thing," the shadowy but playful tale of a beach-combing boy who sees what others can't -- or won't: a lumbering rust-colored being with little red bells on lobster-like claws and an industrial shell wandering unnoticed in the sand. The bespectacled boy, reminiscent of Tan himself, brings the lost thing home to complaints from his parents after consulting his buddy Pete on the endearing thing's place in the world.

"I don't' know, man," Pete concludes. "It's pretty weird. Maybe it doesn't belong to anyone. Maybe it doesn't come from anywhere. Some things are like that ... just plain lost."

The boy stashes the windowed, puppy-like thing in his family's back shed after it opens its top hatch for a feast of Christmas tree ornaments and other household junk. Out of options, he catches a tram with the boiler-shaped creature to the tall, gray "Federal Department of Odds & Ends," where the thing grows sad and the boy is confronted by a pile of paperwork to fill out before he drops off his find.

A mysterious janitor hands him a business card that leads him and the thing to a hidden, cheerier world full of other objects that have no other place.

Tan grew up near the beach in the northern suburbs of Perth in western Australia. With his lost thing, he wanted to set the story "in this almost post-organic universe of people and machines, so instead of natural objects you'd have bits of garbage." The introverted but sympathetic protagonist teeters between adolescence and adulthood, collecting bottle caps at the beach as Tan once did while he plays out his creator's anxiety over balancing the freedom of childhood with societal responsibility.

"It is a somewhat personal story," Tan said. "In real life I think I'd be more afraid of the creature. His innocence means he was able to access an emotional response to this creature that other people who see it are not having."

Tan's trip to the big screen and the Academy Awards podium Sunday night took nine years from the time he reluctantly agreed to turn "The Lost Thing" into a movie. A dozen years after writing the Oscar-worthy story, his lost thing "still feels like yesterday," when he was living alone and "just leaving childhood to some extent, worried about the future, about paying the rent and where the next check was coming from."

"I feel like I'm always on the tipping point between adulthood and childhood," Tan said. "As an adult artist, you're always trying to hold on to that."