Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Hours
A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away-the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder-are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.
Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.
Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.
"Delicious, shivery, sophisticated fairy stories as spat from the pen of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. 'Most of us are safe,' Cunningham writes in his astonishing preface. 'If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you.' But Cunningham will, and does. In a market oversaturated by reworked fairy
Katy Waldman, Slate
"[A Wild Swan is] positively delectable. I had no idea Mr. Cunningham had it in him . . . He can't help but write movingly, even as he's setting fire to our most cherished childhood texts. The book is studded with unexpected moments of grace."
Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
"Five out of five stars. "While there was darkness in the original tales--blood, butchery and much else--Cunningham's collection brings emotional light and shade where there was none . . . The comedy in these stories works brilliantly, but it does not uncut the tragedy of its lonely and quietly tormented outsiders . . . These tales, short, contemporary, disturbing, and alluring, would make perfect vending-machine fodder: a transporting and enthralling read all the way home."
