Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2014) ("The situations in fairy tales also captures deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon." " Unspeakable--unbelievable--acts are also always taking place. Terrible family violence: a father cuts off his daughter's hands, because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her. Small children are damaged: Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their mother and father to die in the woods and then narrowly escape a cannibal witch. And so on. These are acts which contradict all ideas of natural feelings. But these situations, however horribly they beat belief, have been spoken of in the stories, and they are echoed, week by week, in the news. When a child dies at the hands of parents who have starved and tortured him, as in the case of Daniel Pelka, and nobody moves to help him; when young girls are kidnapped and held prisoner by an apparently ordinary man in an ordinary American suburb; and when Josef Fritzl imprisons his daughter in a cellar and keeps her there for twenty-four years, fathering seven children on her until he was discovered in 2008, then fairy tales can be recognized as witnesses to every aspect of human nature. They also act to alert us--or hope to." Id. at 79-80 From the bookjacket: "In this short history, Marin Warner explores a multitude of tale through the ages and their manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. Using a glittering array of examples, . . . she persuasively demonstrates how fairy tales reflect and shape human understanding and culture." Also see Aimee Bender, "Casting Spells," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/25/2015.).
Andrew Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book, with an introduction by Joan Aiken, paintings and decorations by Charles van Sandwyk (London: The Folio Society, 2003).
Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book, with an introduction by Marina Warner, paintings and decorations by Niroot Puttapipat (London: The Folio Society, 2008).
Kazui Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2015) (See Neil Gaiman, "Here Be Dragons," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/1/2015.).
