Children's & Young Adult Fiction : Fairy Tales & Folklore

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" was derived), The Tortoise and the Hare , The North Wind and the Sun and The Boy Who Cried Wolf , are well-known throughout the world. Apollonius of Tyana, the 1st century AD philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:. ...like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent. (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana , Book V:14). [Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop%27s_Fables under the terms of the GNU-FDL] more...

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Follow the earthly adventures of the Curious Moon as she visits the earth … and gets in many interesting adventures. more...

Price: $6.50

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and, well, you know the rest. But was Humpty's fall an accident, or was it murder? It's up to giant killer Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division to get to the bottom of it. Humpty was quite a ladies' man, but a few people thought him a bad egg. Jack has a number of suspects, a new partner to break in and gloryhound/antagonist Detective Inspector Chimes to deal with. Prebble's sonorous British voice is ideally suited to narrating this whimsical, fractured fairy tale; his tone and pacing match Fforde's prose perfectly, and his subtle vocal acrobatics enable him to amusingly bring to life the novel's wildly divergent cast of characters. Despite its many virtues, this is probably Fforde's weakest novel, lacking the literary sophistication of the Thursday Next books. more...

Price: $14.00

Gone Is Gone addresses an age-old question between couples—who works harder? This long-out-of-print children’s book is based on a charming Bohemian tale recited to Wanda Gág when she was a child, and is now available to enchant audiences of all ages. The tale’s sly peasant humor and conversational style combined with Gág’s expressive black-and-white illustrations made the book an instant classic. more...

Price: $15.00

Think you know who's the fairest of them all? Think again. Bestselling re-imaginer of classic fairy tales sets the Snow White story in Renaissance Italy, where the madly vain Lucrezia Borgia plots a dire fate for seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada (a.k.a. Snow White). Exclusive E-Book extra: "Little Snow-White" by the Brothers Grimm (read the original version of the classic fairy tale) more...

Price: $11.95