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Grimm's Fairy Tales is the definitive collection of fairy tales in the English language. This collection includes favorites like Rapunzel, The Frog Prince, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumplestiltzkin. Lesser known stories like The Golden Bird and The Goose-Girl are sure to delight and enchant children of all ages.
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Little Red Riding Hood. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Bluebeard. The Fairies. Many classic fairy tale characters might not have survived into the present were it not for Charles Perrault, a seventeenth-century French civil servant who rescued them from the oral tradition and committed them to paper. Three centuries later, Angela Carter, widely regarded as one of England’s most imaginative writers, adapted them for contemporary readers. The result is a cornucopia of fantastic characters and timeless adventures, stylishly retold by a modern literary visionary.
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The story begins with: On a glass mountain grew a tree with golden apples. An apple would let the picker into the golden castle where an enchanted princess lived. Many knights had tried and failed, so that many bodies lay about the mountain. A knight in golden armor tried. One day, he made it halfway up and calmly went down again. The second day, he tried for the top, and was climbing steadily when an eagle attacked him. He and his horse fell to their deaths. A schoolboy killed a lynx and climbed with its claws attached to his feet and hands. Weary, he rested on the slope. The eagle thought he was carrion and flew down to eat him. The boy grabbed it, and it, trying to shake him off, carried him the rest of the way. He cut off its feet and fell into the apple tree. The peels of the apples cured his wounds, and he picked more, to let him into the castle. He married the princess. The blood of the eagle restored to life everyone who had died trying to climb the mountain.
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The Golden Crab' is a Greek fairy-tale that tells us a story of fisherman who one day cathces a golden crab together with fish. The crab is being taken to the fisherman's house where he demands to be fed. So fisherman and his wife feed the creature. But then he demands to marry the fisherman's young daughter… what will happen next?
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The young minister and the elderly skipper discussed the subject of marriage in a shabby antique room of small size, which had the appearance of having been used to more aristocratic cornpany. The ’dark-oak panelled walls, the grotesquely-carved Ceiling-beams, the Dutch-tiled fire-place, with its ungainly brass dogs, and the deep slanting embrasure of the lozenge-paned casement, suggested Georgian beaux and belles dancing buckram minutes, or at least hard-riding country squires plotting Jacobite restoration. But these happenings were in the long-ago, but this stately Essex manor-house had declined woefully from its high estate, and now sheltered a rough and ready mariner, who camped, rather than dwelt, under its roof.
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In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel, were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon the readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.