Once upon a time, in the Paris of Louis XIV, five ladies and one gentleman-- all of them aristocrats-- seized on the new enthusiasm for "Mother Goose Stories" and decided to write some of them down. Telling stories resourcefully and artfully was a key social grace, and when they recorded these elegant narratives they consciously invented the modern fairy tale as we still know it today.
For this beautiful anthology of six masterpiece wonder tales, Marina Warner gathered five writers with a special sympathy for the French stories they render here in burnished, cunning and amusing English....

Lewis Carroll's stories of Alice have entranced children - and grown-ups - for nearly 150 years. And more than one reader, turning the last page of "Through the Looking-Glass," must have been saddened by the thought that her adventures had well and truly come to an end. Not so Setting himself the daily task of believing "as many as six impossible things before breakfast" (or at least before lunch), Gilbert Adair has written a delightful successor to Carroll's two immortal fantasies. Here, with the aid of Jenny Thorne's Tenniel-inspired illustrations, you will find characters as nonsensical...