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Not Just So I have my favourites just as I am sure you have yours, those tales, told in childhood, which have a lifelong resonance. My grandfather was a particularly good story-teller, both in fact and in fiction, meaning that he could tell true stories and tall stories with equal verve and conviction! Those I liked best he told me time and time again. I loved them, so much so that I would not tolerate any deviation. Like Josephine, Rudyard Kipling’s lost daughter, for me the tales of a grandf...
I can recommend reading this every winter. It has the perfect feeling for the night and it's always great to read classic fairy tales. Philip Pullman did a great job to research Brothers Grimms tales and I like that I also write so grown-up can read it to.
"I want to be God. I want to cause the sun and the moon to rise. I can’t bear it when I see them rising and I haven’t had anything to do with it. But if I were God, I could make it all happen. I could make them go backwards if I wanted. So go and tell the flounder I want to be God.’’ A volume of retellings of the tales that became famous through the effort of the Grimm brothers. Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Rapunzel are here along with more ob
Fairytales are so weird ok. I mean, imagine the Grimm brothers getting the most violent and odd collection of tales together in a book, and then sometime later DISNEY gets a hold of them and says, "These would be perfect soft lovely children's story." Like sure, mate. Also how did you come to that conclusion, but you go.Anyway! I enjoyed reading these in their (slightly edited) original form! I hoped the Pullman commentary would be a bit more...longer or involved? It wasn't. So that was disappoi...
These two brothers are solely responsible for most of the world knowing a number of fairy tales. Their names: Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, two Germans. They were neither the first nor the last to collect stories, slightly adapt and publish them as a collection. However, for some reason, their changes managed to enchant people and before long, theirs were THE Hausmärchen to have and know.Philip Pullman is himself an accomplished author who has apparently been heavily influenced by classic fairy tales...
I grew up loving fairy tales, especially those by the Brothers Grimm. I had them narrated on records, and I’d sit or lay on the carpet and just listen and let my imagination take me away. I took the stories at face value, and never questioned how odd they are, or why things happen in them the way they do. It was just how it was.Now, as an adult, it’s wonderful to be able to get reacquainted with the stories, and to read some I’d never heard of before. In this new translation and version, Philip
Started so strong I thought I'd burn through these but things fell off a bit a third into it, or maybe I just got too used to the transparent language, the patient anonymous tone, the ever-present series of threes, the same ol' motifs. Courage, bravery, goodness, cleverness are rewarded with gold, princesses, and living happily ever after. Greed and evil are often punished by decapitation! Loved it when ultraviolent and weird, or when birds and fish talked, but sometimes the words blended and ke...
I came to this edition of Grimm purely as an accompaniment to Shaun Tan's The Singing Bones a wonderful book of sculptures that illustrate these tales. I must admit to initially being more inspired by the illustrated history of Grimm fairy tales than the fairy tales themselves. However, Philip Pullman has done a nice job collating and "sprucing up" 50 of these stories. I guess your position on his stylistic choices may depend on how much of a Grimm scholar you are. A brief comparison of several...
I am a fairytale geek. I am crazy about them and have been since I was a wee child. I keep various anthologies on my shelf, including the complete Grimm, some Russian tales, and Jack Zipes' fantastic French fairy tale translations. When I heard Philip Pullman was coming out with a collection, I knew I needed it.FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM: A New English Version lives up to my expectations. The selected tales cover both the extremely popular ("Cinderella") and the obscure ("The Stolen Pen...
Fairy tales remind me of that game telephone. The one where a person starts off saying something and as that phrase gets passed from person to person it changes until when the final person says it out loud it is nothing like the original. I feel that this happens quite often with fairy tales. There are so many variations for each tale with every author or storyteller throwing in their own twist. Philip Pullman takes a slightly different approach. He has researched many of these tales from differ...
The mountain and the valley never meet, but the children of men, both good and bad, met one another all the time.-The Two Travelling CompanionsI grew up with fairy tales: first my mom read them to me when I was still too little to do so myself, and then I took the big volumes in my own little hands and laboriously pored over each page, living among the princes and princesses, in worls where there were still giants and everybody paid attention to not mess up with witches, death itself walked the
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3 1/2 stars.I was so excited when I saw this. I love fairy tales (especially fairy tale retellings!!), and I am a fan of Philip Pullman's work, so I thought that this would be totally awesome.As it is, these are not retellings of Grimms' fairy tales, they're just...tellings. He basically copy & pasted 50 Grimm tales and then added a couple paragraphs' commentary at the end of each. Occasionally he says something interesting, but mostly you could do without it. I recently recovered my edition of
7.6/10I knew that the original Grimms tales were a lot darker than the ones that we have been told as little kids... And boy,oh boy are they. These tales (some of them)are great if you are looking something spooky to read at night. I must say that i do not recommend to read that to your child.
Pullman strips the traditional fairytales right back to their core. This was a lovely read, and the little pieces at the end of each tale, where the author gives a little information about the original tale and any changes he may or may not have made, gives real context to the stories, making them even more interesting.
A lovely collection of Grimm fairy tales in their original and murdery glory. Not a huge amount to say about this book except that I enjoyed revisiting familiar tales and reading some new ones! An excellent collection.
This is an odd one.I love Philip Pullman yet I'm not a fan of any Grimm Tale I have read prior to this book. I give this a low rating mainly because it was painfully hard work to read this book at any great pace. Grimm tales are so formulaic, they sometimes don't feel like real stories. Every woman in every story is either so astonishingly beautiful that it could bring a statue to tears or is a witch/evil on epic proportions/monstrously ugly. There's a forest. There's always a fucking forest. Ki...
A retelling of fifty fairy tales from the Grimm brothers by Philip Pullman. Some are famous some are not (Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood…)It was alright but not very exciting, and I loved this tales when I was younger. I guess I found that the writing lacked a little bit of poetry as the retelling is extremely straight to the point and can seem a bit dull. I wish there was more in-dept commentaries or anecdotes from Pullman as well ! Otherwise a quite complete collectio...
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)So here was a quick read I couldn't pass up when randomly coming across it at my neighborhood library the other day -- a new compilation of around 50 classic Grimm Brothers fairytales (some famous but most obscure), done for the 200th anniversary of these tales' first publications, edited and sometimes sl...
Fine, but who is this book for? Pullman's versions of some of the Grimms’ folk stories are well enough written and his little summaries at the end of each tale gives a bit of background to where each story originated and the different versions that have been told in the past. But from the moment I received the book and discovered that, to my amazement, there are no illustrations, I couldn't help but wonder - who exactly is this book for?Pullman has updated the language but not the stories so