Search Worlds Without End

In sixteen spirited essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie, who is also one of our wittiest and most astute cultural commentators, explores the world of children's literature--from Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain to Beatrix Potter--and shows that the best-loved children's books tend to challenge rather than uphold respectable adult values.

The stories of magic and transformation that we call fairy tales are among the oldest known forms of literature, and many the most popular. "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Ridinghood"--these ageless tales seem to have been written an almost magically long time ago.

Yet fairy tales are still being created to this very day. And while they are principally directed to children and have child protagonists, these modern fairy tales, like the classics, have messages to those of all ages.

In The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, Alison Lurie has collected forty tales that date from the late nineteenth century up to the present. Here are trolls and princesses, magic and mayhem, morals to be told and lessons to be learned--all the elements of the classic fairy tale, in new and fantastical trappings. In Charles Dickens's "The Magic Fishbone," we find an unusually pragmatic princess who uses her one wish only after she has tried to solve her family's problems through hard work. Angela Carter's "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" is a "Beauty and the Beast" tale with a contemporary twist, in which Beauty leaves Beast to live the high life, becoming a society brat who "smiled at herself in mirrors too much." And in T.H. White's "The Troll," we find out how his father killed the troll that tried to eat him.

In these enchanting pages we also see how modern writers have taken the classic fairy tale and adapted it to their times in a variety of ways. Francis Browne, for example, takes a poke at Victorian standards of beauty in "The Story of Fairyfoot," about a young prince who is cast out of the kingdom of Stumpinghame because, unlike the fashion of the town, his feet are too small. Some writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, have taken familiar myths and turned them upside down. In Le Guin's "The Wife's Story," a mother sees the horrible transformation of her husband into "the hateful one", and then watches her sister and neighbors mob and kill this "creature whose hair had begun to come away all over his body...the eyes gone blue...staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face." And L.F. Baum's "The Queen of Quok," contains a castle and royal characters in a kingdom run by commonsense and small-town American values. At one point the boy king of Quok has to borrow a dime from his counsellor to buy a ham sandwich, and greed transforms his young queen-to-be into a haggard old woman.

With tales from the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Carl Sandburg, James Thurber, Donald Barthelme, Louise Erdrich, and many more, The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales brings us through the modern-day world of the supernatural, the mystical, the moral, and reminds us that fairy tales are still very much alive.

Contents:

• xi - Introduction (The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales) - (1993) - essay by Alison Lurie
• 1 - Uncle David's Nonsensical Story About Giants and Fairies - (1839) - short story by Catherine Sinclair
• 10 - Feathertop: A Moralized Legend - (1852) - short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• 29 - The King of the Golden River or The Black Brothers - (1841) - novelette by John Ruskin (variant of The King of the Golden River)
• 51 - The Story of Fairyfoot - (1857) - short story by Frances Browne
• 61 - The Light Princess - juvenile - (1864) - novelette by George MacDonald
• 99 - The Magic Fishbone - (1868) - short story by Charles Dickens
• 109 - A Toy Princess - (1877) - short story by Mary de Morgan
• 120 - The New Mother - (1882) - short story by Lucy Clifford [as by Lucy Lane Clifford]
• 140 - Good Luck Is Better Than Gold - juvenile - (1875) - short story by Juliana Horatia Ewing
• 145 - The Apple of Contentment - (1886) - short story by Howard Pyle
• 152 - The Griffin and the Minor Canon - (1992) - short story by Frank R. Stockton [as by Frank Stockton]
• 166 - The Selfish Giant - (1888) - short story by Oscar Wilde
• 170 - The Rooted Lover - (1894) - short story by Laurence Housman
• 178 - The Song of the Morrow - (1896) - short story by Robert Louis Stevenson
• 182 - The Reluctant Dragon - juvenile - (1898) - novelette by Kenneth Grahame
• 203 - The Book of Beasts - juvenile - [The Seven Dragons - 1] - (1899) - short story by E. Nesbit
• 215 - The Queen of Quok - (1901) - short story by L. Frank Baum [as by L. F. Baum]
• 224 - The Magic Shop - (1903) - short story by H. G. Wells
• 234 - The Kith of the Elf-Folk - (1908) - short story by Lord Dunsany
• 248 - The Story of Blixie Bimber and the Power of the Gold Buckskin Whincher - (1922) - short story by Carl Sandburg
• 251 - The Lovely Myfanwy - juvenile - (1925) - novelette by Walter de la Mare
• 278 - The Troll - (1935) - short story by T. H. White
• 289 - Gertrude's Child - (1940) - short story by Richard Hughes
• 300 - The Unicorn in the Garden - (1939) - short story by James Thurber
• 302 - Bluebeard's Daughter - (1935) - novelette by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• 318 - The Chaser - (1940) - short story by John Collier
• 321 - The King of the Elves - (1953) - novelette by Philip K. Dick
• 341 - In the Family - (1957) - short story by Naomi Mitchison
• 352 - The Jewbird - (1963) - short story by Bernard Malamud
• 361 - Menaseh's Dream - juvenile - (1968) - short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (trans. of Der palats 1967) [as by I. B. Singer]
• 367 - The Glass Mountain - (1970) - short story by Donald Barthelme
• 372 - Prince Amilec - juvenile - (1972) - short story by Tanith Lee
• 380 - Petronella - juvenile - (1973) - short story by Jay Williams
• 387 - The Man Who Had Seen the Rope Trick - (1976) - short story by Joan Aiken
• 396 - The Courtship of Mr Lyon - (1979) - short story by Angela Carter (variant of The Courtship of Mr. Lyon)
• 408 - The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet - juvenile - (1981) - short story by Jeanne Desy
• 418 - The Wife's Story - (1982) - short story by Ursula K. Le Guin [as by Ursula Le Guin]
• 422 - The River Maid - (1981) - short story by Jane Yolen
• 427 - The Porcelain Man - (1976) - short story by Richard Kennedy
• 431 - Old Man Potchikoo - (1989) - short story by Louise Erdrich
• 443 - Biographical Notes (The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales) - (1993) - essay by uncredited