Book, 103 Fairy Tales[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. During the early 1990s, English writer Angela Carter collected fairy tales from around the world in two volumes for Virago, having completed the second collection shortly before her death. 103 fairy tales, based on a posthumous edition published in England in 2005, brings together for the first time all the stories organized by Carter, forming a true and extensive panel of world folklore and the narrative traditions of the most varied peoples, from the Arctic to Asia. But despite the name, there are few fairies in these pages, and the reader will also have difficulty finding charming princes and the like. Written at a time when this type of story was not intended for children, the fables contained here give rise to a series of malevolent aunts, treacherous wives, eccentric sisters and dangerous witches. Because they were recorded on paper for the first time in the last two or three hundred years, the stories offer - running behind the plot - a portrait of everyday life in the pre-industrialized world and a little of the social dynamics and other details that with time was lost. More than that, in the tradition of the Italian stories collected by Italo Calvino, these fairy tales offer a precious record of some matrices that later ended up assimilated by Western literature. "A chest of riches." - Times Literary Supplement "Beats the Brothers Grimm, a world-class selection of brutal and entertaining stories." -Observer