Description: One upon a time, in the Paris of Louis XIV, five ladies and a gentleman - all of them urbane aristocrats - seized on the new enthusiasm for "Mother Goose stories" and decided to write some of them down. Telling stories resourcefully and artfully was a key social grace for them, and when they wrote down these elegant narratives, they consciously invented the modern fairy tale as we still know it today. For this beautiful anthology of six masterpiece Wonder Tales, Marina Warner invited the collaboration of five writers with a special sympathy for the French stories they render here in burnished, cunning, and amusing English".The White Cat" (translated by John Ashbery), "The Subtle Princess (Gilbert Adair), "Bearskin" and "Starlight" (Terence Cave), "The Counterfeit Marquise" (Ranjit Bolt), and "The Great Green Worm" (A. S. Byatt) are as unforgettable today as they were when they were first published centuries ago.

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