Jade Story Book; Stories from the Orient

These aren't the fairy tales you grew up with. Gathered from the firesides and courts of India, China, Japan, the Philippines, and Persia, these are the stories that shaped civilizations. Here are trickster tales and moral fables, creation myths and cautionary legends - the kind of narratives that have been passed down for centuries, carrying the wisdom, humor, and fears of entire peoples. Penrhyn Wingfield Coussens assembled this collection in an age when these cultures seemed impossibly distant to Western readers. Yet the tales themselves bridge every gap. A clever merchant outwits a sultan. A dragon hoards something unexpected. A woman defies fate itself. The settings may be foreign, but the emotions - love, ambition, betrayal, wonder - are universal. This is storytelling in its purest form: oral tradition made permanent, the world before screens when narrative was how people made sense of everything.