Cuentos de Hadas, Vol. 1

Here are the tales as they were first told: raw, dark, and unflinching. Long before Disney softened their edges, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm traveled through early 19th-century Germany, collecting stories whispered around hearths and told in taverns. What they found was not the sanitized bedtime fare we know today, but something older and stranger: stories where stepmothers are pushed into shoes filled with hot coals, where wolves devour the innocent, where the cleverest child wins and the cruelest villain meets a gruesome end. This first volume contains the originals behind Snow White, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and dozens more. They are morality tales wrapped in fantasy, warning and rewarding in equal measure. These are the stories that shaped the modern imagination, the bones beneath every fairy tale retold since. To read them is to understand why we tell stories at all: to make sense of danger, to imagine survival, to believe that the clever and the brave might, against all odds, live happily ever after.