Nineteen stories focus on the magical lore and wondrous imaginings of African American women.

"Fairy Tale: A True Story" tells the tale of two little girls who set out to prove the existence of fairies. Starring Peter O'Toole as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harvey Keitel as Harry Houdini, "Fairy Tale: A True Story" is sure to become a family favorite.

Russian literature for children and young people has a history that goes back over 400 years, starting in the late sixteenth century with the earliest alphabet primers and passing through many different phases over the centuries that followed. It has its own success stories and tragedies, talented writers and mediocrities, bestsellers and long-forgotten prize winners. After their seizure of power in 1917, the Bolsheviks set about creating a new culture for a new man and a starting point was children's literature. 70 years of Soviet control and censorship were succeeded in the 1990s by a re-birth of Russian children's literature. This book charts the whole of this story, setting Russian authors and their books in the context of translated literature, critical debates and official cultural policy.

National Book Award-winning poet and author of the internationally best-selling Iron John, Robert Bly revisits a selection of fairy tales and examines how these enduring narratives capture the essence of human nature. Few forms of storytelling have greater power to captivate the human mind than fairy tales, but where do these tales originate from, and what do they mean? Celebrated poet and bestselling author Robert Bly has been asking these questions throughout his career. Here Bly looks at six tales that have stood the test of time and have captivated the poet for decades, from “The Six Swans” to “The Frog Prince.” Drawing on his own creative genius, and the work of a range of thinkers from Kirkegaard and Yeats to Freud and Jung, Bly turns these stories over in his mind to bring new meaning and illumination to these timeless tales. Along with illustrations of each story, the book features some of Bly's unpublished poetry, which peppers his lyric prose and offers a look inside the mind of an American master of letters in the twilight of his singular career.

The famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm - stories like Snow White , Red Riding Hood , and Rumplestiltskin - are know to millions of people around the world and are deeply embedded in the collective psyche. In this charming account, writer and scholar Valerie Paradiz reveals the true story of how the fairy tales came to be. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collectors and editors of more than 200 folk stories, were major German intellects of the nineteenth century, contemporaries of Goethe and Schiller. But as Paradiz reveals here, the romantic image of the two brothers traveling the countryside, transcribing tales told to them by peasants, is a far cry from the truth. In fact, more than half the fairy tales the Grimm brothers collected were actually contributed by their educated female friends from the bourgeois and aristocratic classes. While German folkloric scholars-all of them male-fancied themselves the keepers of the cultural flame, it was a handful of women who ensured that millions would know the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella by heart. Set against the backdrop of the chaotic Napoleonic wars and the years of high German romanticism, Clever Maids chronicles one of the most fascinating literary collaborations in European history and brilliantly captures the intellectual spirit of the men and women of the age. Even more, it illuminates the ways in which the Grimm tales, with their mythic portrayals of courage, sacrifice, and betrayal, still speak so powerfully to us today.

Welcome to the world in which fairy tales are true, where the prominent scientists of the day join together to seek wisdom from a great sage of the Himalayas at the fabled Kumbha Mela. Guided by a trusted myth-spinning storyteller, their journey and its preparation are peppered with tales of metaphysical adventures. From the bohemian Shangri-La of the Oceano Dunes to the ancient Ganges flowing from Himalayan heights, the group travels and discovers the realm of "silent reach." In the tradition of metaphysical fiction that was popular in the 1920's and 30s, Fairy Tales are True sweeps the reader into a vortex of yogis, scientists, spies and fools. Unlike most of those forgotten novels of secret universal Buddhist brotherhoods and mystical Tibetan quests, this book is more than partly true. Bryn Beorse, who was known to the Sufis as Shamcher, was the real deal: an actual world-travelling yogi-sufi who also was an esteemed economist and engineer. Here he has created a fantastical autobiographical allegory in a book that defies categorization. As one long teaching story comprised of nested teaching stories, Beorse's book may take liberties with facts to illustrate truths, but not as often as you might think. It is not only autobiographical, it is also a novelized or storified account of concepts that cannot be easily grasped by the literal mind. From California pre-hippy communes of eighty years ago, to the mysterious convening of the sages in modern-day India, this story sweeps the reader along following the secret thread whose strands have held mankind together for the last few thousand years. Visits to simple villagers with amazing powers alternate with the adventures of an expedition of the world's most important scientists, as Bryn Beorse takes us into the "inner sanctums" of our own everyday world.