Fairy Tales

These are not the fairy tales you think you know. Before Disney, before Hollywood, Hans Christian Andersen populated the darkness with swans who shed their skins, little mermaids who traded their voices for legs, and little match girls who burned their final matches to see heaven. His tales are not gentle lullabies but something far more dangerous: they are dreams where the cost of beauty is measured in pain, where the poor freeze and the emperor parades naked, where transformation is possible but never free. The Little Mermaid's love becomes acid. The Ugly Duckling becomes beautiful only after suffering. The Snow Queen leaves kiss-marks like ice. This collection gathers Andersen's most luminous and most devastating stories, the ones that have haunted readers for nearly two centuries. They are for anyone who remembers that fairy tales were never just for children.