Tales from Silver Lands

The 1925 Newbery Medal winner collects indigenous folk tales from Central and South America, presenting stories that will feel strange and familiar all at once. These are not the fairy tales of European tradition - they carry a different logic, a different terror, a different beauty. A boy who outwits a fearsome tiger. A princess who marries the sun. A trickster rabbit whose cleverness saves villages and destroys giants. Finney gathered these stories from ancient sources and preserved them in language that retains its oral music - the repetition, the unexpected humor, the moments of genuine dread. The Silver Lands (the pre-Columbian Americas) produced a mythology as rich and strange as any on Earth, and this collection was the first major English-language window into that world. A century later, it stillastonishes.