Fairy Ring

Sixty-three jewels from the treasury of world folklore, gathered into one enchanted volume. Here are the tales that have been told around firesides for centuries: Jack outwitting giants, a frog transformed by a kiss, a dwarf with a name too terrible to speak, two sisters as different as snow and roses. Nora Archibald Smith crisscrossed the globe to assemble this collection, pulling stories from Germany and Scandinavia, from the British Isles and beyond. The language retains the rolling cadence of oral tradition, the kind that makes bedtime stretch just a little later. These are not the sanitized versions of later editions but the stories as they were originally told, with all their wit, their danger, their strange logic. Whether read aloud in a candlelit room or discovered by a child alone at midnight, this collection reminds us that fairy tales were never just for children. They are the dreams of the human race, and they still have the power to make the world seem larger than it is.