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The Pleasant Nights - Volume 2
By Don Beecher. 2012
Renowned today for his contribution to the rise of the modern European fairy tale, Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-c. 1557)…
is particularly known for his dazzling anthology The Pleasant Nights. Originally published in Venice in 1550 and 1553, this collection features seventy-three folk stories, fables, jests, and pseudo-histories, including nine tales we might now designate for 'mature readers' and seventeen proto-fairy tales. Nearly all of these stories, including classics such as 'Puss in Boots,' made their first ever appearance in this collection; together, the tales comprise one of the most varied and engaging Renaissance miscellanies ever produced. Its appeal sustained it through twenty-six editions in the first sixty years.This full critical edition of The Pleasant Nights presents these stories in English for the first time in over a century. The text takes its inspiration from the celebrated Waters translation, which is entirely revised here to render it both more faithful to the original and more sparkishly idiomatic than ever before. The stories are accompanied by a rich sampling of illustrations, including originals from nineteenth-century English and French versions of the text.As a comprehensive critical and historical edition, these volumes contain far more information on the stories than can be found in any existing studies, literary histories, or Italian editions of the work. Donald Beecher provides a lengthy introduction discussing Straparola as an author, the nature of fairy tales and their passage through oral culture, and how this phenomenon provides a new reservoir of stories for literary adaptation. Moreover, the stories all feature extensive commentaries analysing not only their themes but also their fascinating provenances, drawing on thousands of analogue tales going back to ancient Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic stories.Immensely entertaining and readable, The Pleasant Nights will appeal to anyone interested in fairy tales, ancient stories, and folk creations. Such readers will also enjoy Beecher's academically solid and erudite commentaries, which unfold in a manner as light and amusing as the stories themselves.Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
By Marina Warner. 2011
Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak,…
dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers’ imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children’s books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories’ magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity’s most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner’s hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (The Annotated Books)
By Hans Christian Andersen, Maria Tatar, Julie K. Allen. 2008
A richly entertaining and informative collection of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, annotated by one of America's leading folklore scholars. In…
her most ambitious annotated work to date, Maria Tatar celebrates the stories told by Denmark's "perfect wizard" and re-envisions Hans Christian Andersen as a writer who casts his spell on both children and adults. Andersen's most beloved tales, such as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Little Mermaid," are now joined by "The Shadow" and "Story of a Mother," mature stories that reveal his literary range and depth. Tatar captures the tales' unrivaled dramatic and visual power, showing exactly how Andersen became one of the world's ten most translated authors, along with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marx. Lushly illustrated with more than one hundred fifty rare images, many in full color, by artists such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen will captivate readers with annotations that explore the rich social and cultural dimensions of the nineteenth century and construct a compelling portrait of a writer whose stories still fascinate us today.The Bear and, His Sons: Masculinity in Spanish and Mexican Folktales
By James M. Taggart. 1997
James Taggart contrasts how two men-a Spaniard and an Aztec-speaking Mexican-tell such tales as "The Bear's Son. " He explores…
how their stories present different ways of being a man in their respective cultures. He also focuses on how fathers reproduce different forms of masculinity in their sons, showing how fathers who care for their infant sons teach them a relational masculinity based on a connected view of human relationships.Divas, Dames & Daredevils
By Maria Elena Buszek, Mike Madrid. 2013
ComicsAlliance and ComicsBlend Best Comic Book of the YearBUST Magazine "Lit Pick" RecommendationCertified CoolTM in PREVIEWS: The Comic Shop's Catalog"Mike…
Madrid gives these forgotten superheroines their due. These 'lost' heroines are now found-to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere." -STAN LEEWonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s, but many other heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Through twenty-eight full reproductions of vintage Golden Age comics, Divas, Dames & Daredevils reintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds.Each spine-tingling chapter opens with Mike Madrid's insightful commentary about heroines at the dawn of the comic book industry and reveals a universe populated by extraordinary women-superheroes, reporters, galactic warriors, daring detectives, and ace fighter pilots-who protected America and the world with wit and guile.In these pages, fans will also meet heroines with striking similarities to more modern superheroes, including The Spider Queen, who deployed web shooters twenty years before Spider Man, and Marga the Panther Woman, whose feral instincts and sharp claws tore up the bad guys long before Wolverine. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but their influence on popular culture, and the heroes we're passionate about today, is unmistakable.Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. Madrid, a San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, also appears in the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines.Bacacay
By Witold Gombrowicz, Bill Johnston. 2004
A balloonist finds himself set upon by erotic lepers...a passenger on a ship notices a human eye on the deck...a…
group of aristocrats enjoy a vegetarian dish made from human flesh...a virginal young girl gnaws raw meat from a bone...a notorious ruffian is terrorized by a rat. Welcome to the bizarre universe of Witold Gombrowicz, whose legendary short story collection is presented here for the first time in English. These tales, hilarious, disturbing, and brilliantly written, are utterly unique in world literature. After reading them, you'll never be the same.Bloodknots
By Ami Sands Brodoff. 2005
"Bloodknots is a truly singular and remarkable book of stories. Lyrical and disturbing, this is the work of a writer…
of unmistakable talent."--Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven, a National Book Award nominee"Bloodknots is a marvelous collection peopled by unforgettable characters."--Nalini Warriar, author of Blues from the Malabar Coast and a McAuslan Book Award winnerA collection of beguiling stories from an American writer who excels at depicting the family ties that bind: fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters whose connections to one another are as fragile as they are irrevocable. Stubbornly honest, and imbued with a sensibility that speaks to the author's Jewish heritage, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with authority, passion, and razor-sharp detail about identity and the longing for human connections in the face of loss and exclusion. Her stories evoke the delicate familial weaves of Alice Munro, exposing the raw nerves of shattered lives redeemed by the willingness to forgive. Written close to the senses, Bloodknots penetrates to the core.Ami Sands Brodoff is from New York and also lived in Princeton, New Jersey, before relocating with her husband to Montreal, where she writes and teaches creative writing. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize nomination and has been anthologized in numerous journals and book collections. Her first book, Can You See Me?, received wide acclaim, including a rave from Publishers Weekly.Skin Folk
By Nalo Hopkinson. 2001
Throughout the Caribbean there are stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these folk their human shape.…
When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. And whatever the burden their skin bears, once they remove it, skin folk can fly...Nalo Hopkinson has gained universal acclaim as one of the most impressively original authors to emerge in years. Her debut novel, "Brown Girl in the Ring," won the "Locus" Award for Best First Novel, became a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and garnered Hopkinson the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her second novel, "Midnight Robber," was a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards.Now she presents "Skin Folk," a richly vibrant collection of short fiction that ranges from Trinidad to Toronto, from fantastic folklore to frightening futures, from houses of deadly haunts to realms of dark sexuality. Powerful and sensual, disturbing and triumphant, these tales explore the surface of modern existence... and delve under the skin of eternal legends.El espejo distraído
By Elsa Bornemann. 2001
Una obra clásica de poemas, canciones y versicuentos donde se pueden encontrar noticias divertidas y raras, personajes simpáticos e ingeniosos…
juegos con el lenguaje, entre los cuales se destacan "La bruja enjabonada", "Receta para hacer un poema" y "Canción del sol resfriado". Un libro que merece el lugar de prestigio que conserva desde su primera edición.Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
By Susan Sellers. 2001
Woman as gorgon, woman as temptress: the classical and biblical mythology which has dominated Western thinking defines women in a…
variety of patriarchally encoded roles. This study addresses the surprising persistence of mythical influence in contemporary fiction. Opening with the question 'what is myth?', the first section provides a wide-ranging review of mythography. It traces how myths have been perceived and interpreted by such commentators as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Roland Barthes, Jack Zipes and Marina Warner. This leads to an examination of the role that mythic narrative plays in social and self formation, drawing on the literary, feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Judith Butler to delineate the ways in which women's mythos can transcend the limitations of logos and give rise to potent new models for individual and cultural regeneration. In this light, Susan Sellers offers challenging new readings of a wide range of contemporary women's fiction, including works by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Anne Rice, Michele Roberts, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon. Topics explored include fairy tale as erotic fiction, new religious writing, vampires and gender-bending, mythic mothers, genre fiction, the still-persuasive paradigm of feminine beauty, and the radical potential of comedy.Teaching Fairy Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
By Gioia Timpanelli, Cristina Mazzoni, Allison Stedman, Ann Schmiesing, Jennifer Schacker, Prof. Nancy L. Canepa, Prof. Jack Zipes, Dean Donald Haase, Lewis C. Seifert, Prof. Anne E. Duggan, Professor Maria Nikolajeva, Prof. Cristina Bacchilega, Associate Professor Christine A. Jones, Julie L. Koehler, Kay Stone, Prof. Maria Tatar, Prof. Victoria Somoff, Prof. Gina Miele, Prof. Linda Kraus Worley, Prof. Faith E. Beasley, Prof. Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, Prof. Benjamin Balak, Prof. Suzanne Magnanini, Maria Kaliambou, Prof. Elio Brancaforte, Prof. William Moebius, Prof. Graham Anderson. 2019
Teaching Fairy Tales edited by Nancy L. Canepa brings together scholars who have contributed to the field of fairy-tale studies…
since its origins. This collection offers information on materials, critical approaches and ideas, and pedagogical resources for the teaching of fairy tales in one comprehensive source that will further help bring fairy-tale studies into the academic mainstream. The volume begins by posing some of the big questions that stand at the forefront of fairy-tale studies: How should we define the fairy tale? What is the "classic" fairy tale? Does it make sense to talk about a fairy-tale canon? The first chapter includes close readings of tales and their variants, in order to show how fairy tales aren’t simple, moralizing, and/or static narratives. The second chapter focuses on essential moments and documents in fairy-tale history, investigating how we gain unique perspectives on cultural history through reading fairy tales. Contributors to chapter 3 argue that encouraging students to approach fairy tales critically, either through well-established lenses or newer ways of thinking, enables them to engage actively with material that can otherwise seem over-familiar. Chapter 4 makes a case for using fairy tales to help students learn a foreign language. Teaching Fairy Tales also includes authors’ experiences of successful hands-on classroom activities with fairy tales, syllabi samples from a range of courses, and testimonies from storytellers that inspire students to reflect on the construction and transmission of narrative by becoming tale-tellers themselves. Teaching Fairy Tales crosses disciplinary, historical, and national boundaries to consider the fairy-tale corpus integrally and from a variety of perspectives. Scholars from many different academic areas will use this volume to explore and implement new aspects of the field of fairy-tale studies in their teaching and research.The Storyteller Essays
By Walter Benjamin. 2019
A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes…
short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin's work.“The Storyteller” is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began.Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing
By Kate Zambreno. 2019
Best Book of 2019: Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 BrooklynA new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and…
cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.In the first half of Kate Zambreno’s astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them."If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby—with Diane Arbus as nanny—it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans.”—Amber Sparks“In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with.”—Brian EvensonThe Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature
By André Naffis-Sahely. 2019
A fascinatingly diverse anthology of the literature of exile, from the myths of Ancient Egypt to contemporary poetryExile lies at…
the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages. Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Swahili Song of Liyongo, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Emma Goldman's travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani's ode to the lost world of Andalusia and the work of contemporary Eritrean fabulist Ribka Sibhatu.Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.Todos mis cuentos
By Ana María Matute. 2015
Reunimos en un libro todos los cuentos para niños y mayores de Ana María Matute La obra de Ana María…
Matute se cuenta entre las mejores de la literatura contemporánea. Ha cultivado varias facetas de la escritura, como la novela o la narración autobiográfica, pero en la totalidad de su producción desempeñan un papel central los cuentos. Presentamos aquí una recopilación de sus relatos, en la que pueden encontrarse joyas del género como «Sólo un pie descalzo» o «El polizón del Ulises», galardonados con los más importantes premios y disfrutados por lectores de todas las edades. Este libro es una invitación al mundo creativo de una autora que ha roto fronteras, tópicos, cegueras y, especialmente, tedios. Reseña:«Ana María Matute tiene algo de maga, desde luego: es una hechicera de la palabra.»Rosa MonteroThe Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters
By Maria Tatar. 2020
We think we know the story of Snow White from Disney and the Brothers Grimm. But acclaimed folklorist Maria Tatar…
reveals dazzling variations from across the globe. The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl, only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her “the most beautiful of all.” The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But, as every fan of the story knows, there is more to Snow White than that. The magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the catatonic sleep, and the strange scene of revivification are important elements in the phantasmagoria of the Snow White universe. Maria Tatar, an acclaimed folklorist and translator, brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out across countries and cultures.The Mary Poppins that many people know of today--a stern, but sweet, loveable, and reassuring British nanny--is a far cry…
from the character created by Pamela Lyndon Travers in the 1930's. Instead, this is the Mary Poppins reinvented by Disney in the eponymous movie. This book sheds light on the original Mary Poppins, Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins is the only full-length study that covers all the Mary Poppins books, exposing just how subversive the pre-Disney Mary Poppins character truly was. Drawing important parallels between the character and the life of her creator, who worked as a governess herself, Grilli reveals the ways in which Mary Poppins came to unsettle the rigid and rigorous rules of Victorian and Edwardian society that most governesses embodied, taught, and passed on to their charges.This new edition is a completely rewritten and revised version of Rose's original, seminal, text. Adding a huge amount of…
new material, Robin Hard incorporates the results of the latest research into his authoritative accounts of all the gods and heroes. The narrative framework of the book includes helpful signposting so that the book can be used as work of reference, and alongside the narrative chapters, it includes full documentation of the ancient sources, maps, and genealogical tables. Illustrated throughout with numerous photographs and line drawings, it will remain the definitive account of ancient Greek mythology for generations to come.Sunset: A Ch'ae Manshik Reader (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
By Manshik Ch'Ae. 2017
Ch’ae Manshik is one of the most accomplished modern Korean writers yet is underrepresented in English translation because of the…
challenges posed by his distinctive voice and colloquial style. Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader is the first English-language anthology of his works and features a variety of genres—novella, short fiction, anecdotal essay, travel writing, children’s story, one-act play, three-act play, and roundtable discussion.This anthology moves beyond the usual “representative works” to provide a well-rounded selection of writing by one of Korea’s most innovative and memorable voices, drawing on Ch'ae's ten-volume Complete Works. This edition also provides a comprehensive introduction outlining the limitations of existing approaches to Ch'ae. It contextualizes the anthology's contents both in terms of the author's career and the rich Korean tradition of intertextuality and intermediality that he reflects from the country's earliest times to the new millennium.