The Red Shoes And Other Tattered Tales

Best known for her Gothic language handbooks (reissued recently as The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her seductive grammar dramas. The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales ("The Glass Shoe," "The Gingerbread Variations," "The Little Match Girl," "Don Juan Is a Woman," and the title story, among others) sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication--such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here," Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet." Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality.

In his latest book, fairy tales expert Jack Zipes explores the question of why some fairy tales "work" and others don't, why the fairy tale is uniquely capable of getting under the skin of culture and staying there. Why, in other words, fairy tales "stick." Long an advocate of the fairy tale as a serious genre with wide social and cultural ramifications, Jack Zipes here makes his strongest case for the idea of the fairy tale not just as a collection of stories for children but a profoundly important genre. Why Fairy Tales Stick contains two chapters on the history and theory of the genre, followed by case studies of famous tales (including Cinderella, Snow White, and Bluebeard), followed by a summary chapter on the problematic nature of traditional storytelling in the twenty-first century.

Have children ever really had a literature of their own? In Sticks and Stones, Jack Zipes explores children's literature, from the grissly moralism of Slovenly Peter to the hugely successful Harry Potter books, and argues that despite common assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity. Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.

In this wide-ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetics of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative—to storytelling centered on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiraling" of events as found in modernism—and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central instance of the human mind." By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson begins by examining the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. He traces the interactions between the folktale and Italo Calvino’s Fiabe Italiane, between selected fictions of John Barth and the Arabian Nights, between the work of Robert Coover and the subgenre of the fairy tale, and between the "Bluebeard" stories and recent feminist retellings by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. The arguments presented will interest not only folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.

The basic rules governing the use of periods, semicolons, hyphens, commas, and other punctuation marks are illustrated by original explanations and humorous sample sentences. Reprint.

Uses imaginative examples to illustrate the meaning of words from abrogate, brouhaha, and cachinnate to susurration, truculence, and voluble.

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.