We think we know the story of Snow White from Disney and the Brothers Grimm. But acclaimed folklorist Maria Tatar reveals dazzling variations from across the globe. The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl, only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her "the most beautiful of all." The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone--the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But, as every fan of the story knows, there is more to Snow White than that. The magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the catatonic sleep, and the strange scene of revivification are important elements in the phantasmagoria of the Snow White universe. Maria Tatar, an acclaimed folklorist and translator, brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out across countries and cultures.

The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters

Literature & Fiction

Tatar, María

Genre Fiction

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Review\n“Tilt the magic mirror this way, that, and you’ll find in The Fairest of Them All nearly two dozen reflections, each dazzling, of the ur-fairy tale known as Snow White. With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.”―Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Mirror Mirror\n“A fascinating volume…Far from demystifying fairy tales, Tatar’s analysis has the effect of deepening an appreciation for their magic…The Fairest of Them All delivers a trove of forgotten fairy tales to readers and returns the Snow White of Disney and the Brothers Grimm to her international context―as but one version in a strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.”―Wall Street Journal\n“Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all? The answer must be yes. Maria Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale, unearths retellings from far and wide, and spreads a feast of rich thoughts on the tale’s remarkable aesthetic migrations into literature and film. The Fairest of Them All is an exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.”―Marina Warner, author of Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights\n“The Snow White tales that Tatar presents here are not as slick as the confections of the Grimms and Disney… What Tatar urges in her deft and thoughtful introduction is that we read each variation, whether it is from West Africa, Afghanistan or China, with equal attention… This provides a way of thinking about how fairy tales reveal more than the essentially early 20th-century upper bourgeois insights of Freudian psychoanalysts. There are plenty of examples of mother–daughter rivalries in these tales to be sure, but there is so much more of the material and temporal world―food, hunger, disease, and war―too.”―Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian\n“[A] fascinating collection of tales…Shocking yet familiar, these stories of regeneration and transformation even when written down retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book that follows Snow White’s trail into the darker forests of the human psyche in which she originated.”―Lucy Lethbridge, Literary Review\n“Going to the root of a story is a journey to the very core of the soul. Reading across the world, the inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’”―Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury\n“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.” 
―Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked\nThe story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone―the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures.\n“Fascinating…A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal pers

Grimm's Grimmest

Murder, kidnapping, cruel and unusual punishment, violent revenge these are not the bedtime stories mummy used to read. Newly reissued with a fresh cover, Grimm's Grimmest presents nineteen original, unsanitized, wholly unholy tales as they were first collected by the Brothers Grimm circa 1822 all fiendishly illustrated. The tales harken back to a time when travelers risked roasting or worse, and bad manners yielded frightful consequences. An insightful introduction makes sense of the mayhem, shedding light on how the Grimm brothers went from macabre to mainstream in fairly short order. From the true horror of Aschenputtel (the original Cinderella story) to Rapunzel's dark secret, Grimm's Grimmest features the authentic stories born long ago in the land of the Black Forest, at a time when fairy tales never ended happily ever after.

Jacob, Grimm

Wilhelm, Grimm

Contemporary

Chronicle Books+

The Heroine with 1001 Faces

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. 
The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work―spinning, mending, and weaving―is carried out. 
Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. 
In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. 
“By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history. 50 black-and-white illustrations

History & Criticism

Liveright

A book of this grade is solidly good. Rarely read. Spine is sturdy. All pages are intact. Cover is clean. No marks anywhere.

The Annotated Brothers Grimm: The Bicentennial Edition

Byatt

Rose King

Gretel Rapunzel Hansel

W.W.Norton&Company

Product Description 
World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. 
The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out. 
Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. 
In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. 
“By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history. 
50 illustrations 
 Review 
"She is stirring what J.R.R. Tolkien once called the 'cauldron of story' in search of the girls and women, some silenced and some forgotten, some from the Iliad and some from Netflix, who live in Campbell’s blind spot. The reader jumps from Arachne’s battle with Athena to the escape of Bluebeard’s trickster wife to Pippi Longstocking and Nancy Drew and even to Carrie Bradshaw typing away on her laptop." 
 ― 
Gal Beckerman, New York Times Book Review\n"From Penelope and Pandora to Katniss Everdeen and Lisbeth Salander, the ‘hero's journey’ gets a much-needed makeover... Starting with Greek mythology and Scheherezade and moving through the centuries all the way to the 
Game of Thrones series and 
The Queen's Gambit, Tatar incisively explores women's reinvention of heroism to embrace empathy, compassion, and care, often to pursue social justice... The book really takes off when it gets to contemporary culture, particularly in a section that identifies a female version of the ‘trickster’ archetype in Everdeen and Salander. Of this lineage, among the sha

Los cuentos de hadas clásicos anotados / The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (Spanish Edition)

Classics

Planeta Publishing

La heroína de las 1001 caras (Spanish Edition)

Ediciones Koan S.L.

Los cuentos de hadas clásicos anotados: Prólogo y edición de Maria Tatar

Children's Books

Editorial Crítica.

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