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336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 2022
All of the storytellers in this book had enormous challenges to face, from poverty to political turmoil, from psychological afflictions to the horrors of war. Some succeeded in overcoming these challenges, but not all of them did. As we’ll discover, ‘happy ever after’ is a cliché often spurned by the tales themselves. Many of our most beloved stories end sadly, and so, unfortunately, did many of our fairy tellers. But all of them lived, and most of them loved; several of them travelled, experiencing many different shades of the world, and a couple of them succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
From the global to the local: the most popular fairy tales are astonishingly agile at aping each other’s structures while transplanting themselves to new locales. As we’ll discover with some of the other tellers in this book, there’s an eerie parallel between the trajectories of disease and the pathways of stories: virulently contagious and cunningly adaptable.
Some people come back with jewels pouring out of their mouths, some are covered in pitch or charred with fire. Whatever their experience, everybody returns from the forest knowing more about themselves than when they set out. Tales and trails intertwine, and every one of them is a magic mirror. Like the tellers, we can look into this mirror to see the world — in its splendour and madness and brutality — and if we look carefully enough, we see ourselves peering back.
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