Wonder Tales: Favorite Fairy Tales from Around the World
About this audiobook
This collection of forty fairy tales contains well-known favorites from authors like the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, Charles Perrault, Madame de Beaumont, and Joseph Jacobs. It also collects rare gems from folk tale traditions around the world, from Germany to China, from Scandinavia to Arabia, from Russia to Japan, and from Italy to Canada. These beautiful, frightening, funny, romantic, and whimsical stories will introduce you to princesses in peril, beastly brides and grooms, adults and children behaving badly, daring and adventurous girls, and clever and devious tricksters. These wondrous tales will be enjoyed by listeners both young and old.
About the author
Charles Perrault (1628–1703) was a French author and intellectual. Known as a founding writer of the fairy tale genre, he rewrote numerous folk tales, including Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Blue Beard, and Puss in Boots. His stories, which continue to enjoy worldwide acclaim, have been adapted to opera, ballet, theater, and film.
Elizabeth Klett is an English literature professor by day and an audiobook narrator by night. She has been a professional audiobook narrator since 2011 and has produced over 170 titles. She trained as an actor at Drew University and holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois. She loves reading (and teaching) fiction, drama, and poetry of all kinds, and delights in creating distinctive voices and accents for literary characters. An absolute Anglophile, Elizabeth has narrated dozens of books in a British accent, despite the fact that she's originally from New Jersey. Her expertise in analyzing and understanding literature makes her recordings particularly enjoyable for her listeners.
Joseph Jacobs, (1854–1916) was an Australian-born English folklore scholar, one of the most popular nineteenth-century adapters of children’s fairy tales. He was also a historian of pre-expulsion English Jewry, a historian of Jewish culture, and a literary scholar.
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were scholars best known for their lifelong dedication to collecting and publishing ancient German folk tales.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement. Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895. Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780) was the author of Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales. In 1746 she left France for London, where she had successful publishing career. Her version of “Beauty and the Beast” has been retold countless times, both in film and on stage.
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish writer and author of many notable books including The Snow Queen. He specialized in writing fairytales that were inspired by tales he had heard as a child. As his writing evolved his fairytales became more bold and out of the box. Andersen's stories have been translated into more than 125 languages and have inspired many plays, films and ballets.
