Book Description | Giambattista Basile was a seventeenth-century Italian poet whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of fairy tales. The Tale of Tales opens with Princess Zoza, unable to laugh no matter how funny the joke. Her father, the king, attempts to make her smile; instead he leaves her cursed whereupon the prince she is destined to marry is snatched up by another woman. To expose this impostor and win back her rightful husband, Zosa contrives a storytelling extravaganza: fifty fairy tales to be told by ten sharp-tongued women (including Zoza in disguise) over five days. Funny and scary, romantic and gruesome, and featuring kings and queens, dragons and seduction, The Tale of Tales is a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature |
About the Author | Emily Jane Bronte was born July 30, 1818, at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick and Maria Bronte. Although Emily did spend a few short times away from Haworth, it was her primary residence and the rectory where she resided now serves as a Bronte Museum. Emily's only close friends were her brother Branwell and her sisters Charlotte and Anne. Emily died of tuberculosis on December 19, 1848, also at the age of thirty, and never knew the great success of her only novel Wuthering Heights, which was published almost exactly a year before her death. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1961, Ruben Toledo is an illustrator, painter, sculptor and filmmaker. His fashion illustrations have appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, Visionaire, Paper, Interview and The New York Times, and his commissions have included Tiffany & Co., Estee Lauder and Nordstrom's national advertising campaign. Toledo and his designer wife Isabel Toledo are the subject of both a book and museum exhibition entitled Toledo/Toledo: A Marriage of Art and Fashion. Together they were recipients of the 2005 Cooper-Hewitt Design Award for their work in fashion. |