Mary McMyne's Fairy Tale Book Giveaway

One lucky winner will receive these six autographed, collectible, fairy-tale-inspired books in Mary McMyne's Fairy Tale Book Giveaway. McMyne is the author of Wolf Skin which will be appearing on this blog soon.

More On These Books:

Fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar called the world of Ronlyn Domingue’s The Chronicle of Secret Riven: Keeper of Tales Trilogy: Book Two (The Keeper of Tales Trilogy) a “wonderfully inventive realm” and its title character “so powerful that we are both startled and enchanted as we tumble headlong into her world.”

Andrei Codrescu said the poems in Mary McMyne’s Wolf Skin “reanimate the ancient, tragic fairy-tale figures of Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel” in “marvelous prose-poetry stereopticons… stories to be truly chilled by, wolf hair by wolf hair.”

Harper’s Bazaar praised Signe Pike’s memoir, Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, for its “distinctive voice and elegant prose” that captures “the hopefulness of childhood and the magic of believing.”

In a review for Strange Horizons, Lesley Wheeler praised the “lush, uncanny poems, such as ‘Notes from a Fairy Autopsy’ and ‘Naming the Never-Birds” in Sally Rosen Kindred’s Peter-Pan-inspired chapbook Darling Hands, Darling Tongue for their “dazzling fantasy.”

Library Journal said Carolyn Turgeon’s The Fairest of Them All: A Novel “incorporates a sense of melancholy that adds an enormous amount of depth” to this “magic-sparked… fresh…” fairy-tale mash-up, which imagines Rapunzel growing up to become Snow White’s wicked stepmother.

Faerie Magazine #26 features whimsical articles on fairy-tale art, photography, travel, and fashion; humor and lifestyle columns; fairy-tale fiction by Kate Forsyth and Joanne Harris; and a fascinating interview with fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar.

Good luck!

Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale by Veronica L. Schanoes

Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale by Veronica L. Schanoes was released late in May. Schanoes has been active on SurLaLune over the years, so I was thrilled to see her name come up as the author of a fairy tale related tome. Funny how my training always makes me want to write last names for authors until I know them--then I keep wanting to type Veronica, Veronica, Veronica.

I have a review copy of the book arriving soon and Veronica (!) and I are plotting a guest post from her for the blog. But I wanted to share the book announcement with description and table of contents while we are making that happen.

Book description:

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne Sexton, Olga Broumass, and Angela Carter were embarked on their own revisionist project to breathe new life into fairy tales and classical myths based on traditional gender roles. Similarly, in the 1990s, second-wave feminist clinicians continued the work begun by Chodorow and Miller, while writers of fantasy that include Terry Windling, Tanith Lee, Terry Pratchett, and Catherynne M. Valente took their inspiration from revisionist authors of the 1970s. As Schanoes shows, these two decades were both particularly fruitful eras for artists and psychoanalytic theorists concerned with issues related to the development of women's sense of self. Putting aside the limitations of both strains of feminist psychoanalytic theory, their influence is undeniable. Schanoes's book posits a new model for understanding both feminist psychoanalytic theory and feminist retellings, one that emphasizes the interdependence of theory and art and challenges the notion that literary revision involves a masculinist struggle with the writer's artistic forbearers.

Contents: Introduction: the mother’s looking-glass; Mother-daughter relationships in theory and text; Revisions of motherhood and daughterhood; Revision and repetition; Through the looking glass: mirrors, fantasy, and reality; Double vision: women and fantasy; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Veronica L. Schanoes is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, USA. She works on fairy tales as well as children's literature.

Table of Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Mother’s Looking-Glass 1

1 Mother-Daughter Relationships in Theory and Text 15

2 Revisions of Motherhood and Daughterhood 33

3 Revision and Repetition 57

4 Through the Looking Glass: Mirrors, Fantasy, and Reality 85

5 Double Vision: Women and Fantasy 113

Epilogue 141

Bibliography 145

Index 151

Once Upon a Time... by Studio C

Studio C is a skit based comedy show on BYUtv. This week they had two skits inspired by fairy tales. The above draws inspiration from the Brothers Grimm, "Once Upon a Time..." The comments say it is Pythonesque. What do you think?

Warning: The skit is fun but it will also inspire you to play a round of "Guess the first line of famous books."

Below is another that certainly finds inspiration in Disney's Maleficent, "Our Wedding Day" by Studio C:

New Book: Grimms' Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey

Grimms' Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey is released this week. It is the first release of several in 2014 in Wayne State University Press's Series in Fairy-Tale Studies.

That cover will certainly grab your attention! It's not like any other fairy tale criticism book sitting on my shelves! Manga fans will recognize it from Junko Mizuno's Hansel and Gretel (Viz Graphic Novel).

WSUP sent me a review copy (thank you!) and while I haven't finished reading it, it is fascinating reading so far. When I first read about it several months ago, the book description reminded me of Reception of Grimm's Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions edited by Donald P. Haase (which is bargain priced currently!). Haase's book has a narrower geographic focus. Haase also happens to be the general editor of this series from WSU Press so he in a way is getting to expand the published works on a topic he is quite knowledgeable about specifically--the Grimms, their translations, and their impact that is. He knows a lot about other fairy tale areas, of course, but the Grimms are one of his specialties.

But back to the new book. This new title, Grimms' Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception, expands the geography of the discussion about the Grimms' impact globally. Yes, Europe is here with articles about Spain, Croatia, and Poland, for example. But we also get China, India, Korea, and Japan. Colombia is represented, too. I've included the table of contents below to illustrate the breadth of topics and regions.

The book starts strong from page one with a robust introduction discussing how the Grimms have generally been translated, disseminated, and even assimilated into other cultures. The intro is worth the price of admission alone. After all, as it points out, "the Brothers Grimm are also listed in the top ten most frequently translated authors in the world." Anyone who has ever dabbled in translation literary works can appreciate the diversity of those translations, depending on the purposes of the translator (and his/her publisher). Economics and cultural preferences impact the decisions made as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the translator and the diversity between languages.* The accompanying articles delve into these topics from a variety of perspectives that will fascinate you. You will not find the usual suspects of fairy tale literary criticism within, at least not much. This book feels--starting from its cover--very fresh and modern.

On a practical note, it will also provide some fun scope for student papers, for those students searching for academic resources for unusual Grimms discussions.

Book description:

Grimms' fairy tales are among the best-known stories in the world, but the way they have been introduced into and interpreted by cultures across the globe has varied enormously. In Grimms' Tales around the Globe, editors Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey bring together scholars from Asia, Europe, and North and Latin America to investigate the international reception of the Grimms' tales. The essays in this volume offer insights into the social and literary role of the tales in a number of countries and languages, finding aspects that are internationally constant as well as locally particular.

In the first section, Cultural Resistance and Assimilation, contributors consider the global history of the reception of the Grimms' tales in a range of cultures. In these eight chapters, scholars explore how cunning translators and daring publishers around the world reshaped and rewrote the tales, incorporating them into existing fairy-tale traditions, inspiring new writings, and often introducing new uncertainties of meaning into the already ambiguous stories. Contributors in the second part, Reframings, Paratexts, and Multimedia Translations, shed light on how the Grimms' tales were affected by intermedial adaptation when traveling abroad. These six chapters focus on illustrations, manga, and film and television adaptations. In all, contributors take a wide view of the tales' history in a range of locales-including Poland, China, Croatia, India, Japan, and France.

Grimms' Tales around the Globe shows that the tales, with their paradox between the universal and the local and their long and world-spanning translation history, form a unique and exciting corpus for the study of reception. Fairy-tale and folklore scholars as well as readers interested in literary history and translation will appreciate this enlightening volume.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

I. Cultural Resistance and Assimilation

1. No-Name Tales: Early Croatian Translations of the Grimms’ Tales
Marijana Hameršak

2. Polishing the Grimms’ Tales for a Polish Audience: Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen in Poland
Monika Wozniak

3. The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Spain: Translation, Reception, and Ideology
Isabel Hernández and Nieves Martín-Rogero

4. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm in Colombia: A Bibliographical History
Alexandra Michaelis-Vultorius

5. “They are still eating well, and living well”: The Grimms’ Tales in Early Colonial Korea
Dafna Zur

6. The Influence of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales on the Folk Literature Movement in China (19181943)
Dechao Li

7. The Grimm Brothers’ Kahaniyan: Hindi Resurrections of the Tales in Modern India by Harikrishna Devsare
Malini Roy

8. Before and after the “Grimm Boom”: Reinterpretations of the Grimms’ Tales in Contemporary Japan
Mayako Murai

II. Reframings, Paratexts, and Multimedia Translations

9. Translating in the “Tongue of Perrault”: The Reception of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in France
Cyrille François

10. Skeptics and Enthusiasts: Nineteenth-Century Prefaces to the Grimms’ Tales in English Translation
Ruth B. Bottigheimer

11. German Stories/British Illustrations: Production Technologies, Reception, and Visual Dialogue across Illustrations from “The Golden Bird” in the Grimms’ Editions, 18231909
Sara Hines

12. Marvelous Worlds: The Grimms’ Fairy Tales in GDR Children’s Films
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

13. Retelling “Hansel and Gretel” in Comic Book and Manga Narration: The Case of Philip Petit and Mizuno Junko
Marianna Missiou

14. Fairy-Tale Scripts and Intercultural Conceptual Blending in Modern Korean Film and Television Drama
Sung-Ae Lee

Contributors
Index

*I've never shared my woe over translating tales and spending HOURS trying to decide on what words to use for spinning and cloth production implements. The implements could be regional, archaic, and hard to describe, especially to a world who mostly doesn't spin any more. Sometimes the implements were archaic and not well known when the tale was written down two hundred years ago. How could I hope to choose the right words for them for English readers? Never mind the further difficulties of narrator's tone, setting, character names, etc.

Bargain Book: Reception of Grimm's Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions edited by Donald P. Haase

For 15 more copies, Reception of Grimm's Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions edited by Donald P. Haase is bargain priced in PAPER not EBOOK for $8.78. I discovered this today when I was composing another post that is forthcoming and had to share. This is a great price for a great book. It is out of print, so getting brand new used copies for a used price is a grand thing.

This book is an important volume in reading about how the Grimms have been used and interpreted. The scope is definitely Western culture--European and U.S.--but it is a fine book to add to your fairy tale library for a GREAT price.

Book description:

The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales brings together premier scholars of the fairy tale, including Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes, with acclaimed creative writers such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jane Yolen, and award-winning artist Trina Schart Hyman. The essays address the reception of the Grimms' texts by their readers; the dynamics between Grimms' collection and its earliest audiences; and aspects of the literary, philosophical, creative, and oral reception of the tales, illuminating how writers, philosophers, artists, and storytellers have responded to, reacted to, and revised the stories, thus shedding light on the ways in which past and contemporary transmitters of culture have understood and passed on the Grimms' tales.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 8

Introduction 9

The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales 24

Heinrich Prohle: A Successor to the Brothers Grimm 41

The Spoken and the Read: German Popular Stories and English Popular Diction 59

The Publishing History of Grimms' Tales: Reception at the Cash Register 78

Trivial Pursuit? Women Deconstructing the Grimmian Model in the Kaffeterkreis 102

Little Brier Rose: Young Nietzsche's Sleeping Beauty Poem as Legend and Swan Song 127

Fairy-Tale Allusions in Modern German Aphorisms 149

The Struggle for the Grimms' Throne: The Legacy of the Grimms' Tales in the FRG and GDR since 1945 167

Wilhelm Grimm/Maurice Sendak: Dear Mili and the Literary Culture of Childhood 207

Response and Responsibility in Reading Grimms' Fairy Tales 230

Once Upon a Time Today: Grimm Tales for Contemporary Performers 250

Personal Reflections on the Scholarly Reception of Grimms' Tales in France 269

The Brothers Grimm and Sister Jane 283

Grimms' Remembered 290

"Cut It Down, and You Will Find Something at the Roots" 293

Ashputtle: or, The Mother's Ghost 301

Notes on Contributors 304

Index 309

New Book: Once Upon a Dream: From Perrault's Sleeping Beauty to Disney's Maleficent by Charles Solomon

Once Upon a Dream: From Perrault's Sleeping Beauty to Disney's Maleficent (Disney Editions Deluxe (Film)) by Charles Solomon (Author), Don Hahn (Introduction) is released tomorrow. This should be of interest to those of you who liked my post, Maleficent and Sleeping Beauty: Where Did She Come From? And if you liked Maleficent, of course.

This book will be focused on the Disney films with some history from what I can see. And commenting from my earlier post, yes, Carabosse in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet definitely influenced Disney's Maleficent, but Maleficent is certainly her own new level of villainy. Carabosse is important in the ballet, of course, but she isn't as relentless in her pursuit of revenge as Maleficent. We don't have a fight to the death. She insures the curse is fulfilled but doesn't really go further to insure Aurora's death like Maleficent does.

Book description:

With its themes of a beautiful princess, a dashing prince, and love triumphing over powerful magic, "Sleeping Beauty" remains one of the most beloved of all fairy tales. The story was first published by Charles Perrault in 1697. Perrault's vision of the ageless, enchanted princess slumbering in her vine-encrusted tower has fascinated readers and artists for more 300 years three times as long as the heroine slept. This heavily-illustrated book will trace the history of that fascination, which has manifested itself in literature, fine art, poetry, music, and film.

The most celebrated cinematic version of Sleeping Beauty is Walt Disney's, the glorious finale of the animated fairy tales he began in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Although Briar Rose/Aurora was the most beautiful and beautifully animated of the Disney princesses, the film was dominated by Maleficent: Perrault's shriveled old fairy was transformed into the epitome of the lovely but terrible sorceress of fantasy literature.

The book will conclude with the development and creation of Maleficent, including interviews with Angelina Jolie, Imelda Staunton, Linda Woolverton, Sean Bailey, Joe Roth, Don Hahn, and director Robert Stromberg (Oscar-winning art director of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland); behind-the-scenes details and photography; costumes, props, and makeup; and plenty of movie magic!

Charles Solomon is an internationally respected critic and historian of animation. He has written on the subject for The New York Times, TV Guide, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, Modern Maturity, Film Comment, and The Hollywood Reporter. His books include The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey; Tale As Old As Time: The Art and Making of Beauty and the Beast; Disney Lost and Found; The Prince of Egypt: A New Vision in Animation; The Disney That Never Was; and Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the first film book to be nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award.

Fantasy Ebooks in New Big Deal Sale

Amazon has a new The Big Deal: Kindle Books Up to 85% Off thru June 28th. I thought I'd share some titles. Some are discounted this low for the first time, some are repeats. Betsy Red Hoodie by Gail Carson Levine pictured above is $2.99.

The Extra-Ordinary Princess by Carolyn Q. Ebbitt is $1.99.

The Farwalker's Quest by Joni Sensel is $1.99.

The Amaranth Enchantment by Julie Berry is $1.99.

Queen of the Dark Things: A Novel by C. Robert Cargill is $1.99.

Fun With Vellum: Hansel and Gretel illustrated by Sybille Schenker

Hansel and Gretel by Brothers Grimm (Author), Sybille Schenker (Illustrator) was released last year and frankly stayed off my radar. That cover is not anything to get excited about, is it? Especially when the image is so small you can't see the flowers in the title font unless you look very carefully. Here is the Hansel & Gretel (UK link), too.

So the book uses vellum and clever illustration design to foreshadow story elements in picture. I tried to pick some images to show that that works, but this is a book that works best in person, not online, thanks to the magic of the materials used to make it.

And if you like this, another edition--one of Little Red Riding Hood--will be released this October.

Book description:

This tale of children in peril has timeless appeal, and the breathtaking illustrations will find a discriminating audience

This stunning edition of the classic fairy tale makes brilliant use of translucent paper and silhoutte-like illustrations to enliven every page. “Once upon a time, there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children, Hansel and Gretel . . .” and so begins the thrilling story of two children relying on their wits to survive in a hostile world. Sybille Schenker’s evocative and exquisite illustrations bring a unique beauty and graphic excellence to a timeless favorite.

Skipping ahead several pages:

New Book: A Catfish Tale: A Bayou Story of the Fisherman and His Wife by Whitney Stewart

A Catfish Tale: A Bayou Story of the Fisherman and His Wife by Whitney Stewart (Author), Gerald Guerlais (Illustrator) is a new book, a Southern take on the Fisherman and His Wife fairy tale. As always, the illustrations say more than I can..

Book description:

Deep in the bayou, a Cajun fisherman named Jack catches a magic fish that offers to grant wishes in exchange for being set free. Jack doesn't have a lot of wishes, but his wife Jolie sure does--for a mansion, a paddleboat, fame and fortune! With each wish, all the fish says is "Ah, tooloulou--if that ain't the easiest thing to do." But when Jolie wants to be crowned Mardi Gras queen, have things gone too far?