The Red Fairy Book

The Red Fairy Book gathers thirty-seven tales from across Europe, pulled from the traditions of France, Germany, Scotland, Norway, and elsewhere. Here you'll find the twelve dancing princesses whose nightly wanderings leave their shoes in tatters, a boy who wins a princess through cleverness and magic, lassos that bind impossible things, and princesses cursed into raven form. These are the stories that preceded Disney, that preceded the sanitized bedtime versions. They carry the roughness of oral tradition, the logic of dreams, the economy of folk narrative where consequences arrive swiftly and wishes curdle into lessons. Lang, working in the 1890s, gathered these from their sources and rendered them with minimal authorial interference, preserving the strangeness. The result reads like overhearing a firelight story in a long-ago castle: some tales charm, some chill, all of them possess the peculiar compression of stories that have been told and retold for centuries. For readers who want fairy tales as they actually were: not safe, not simple, but vivid and strange and alive.