The Wild Swan and Other Tales

by Michael Cunningham


4.00 out of 5 based on 1 customer rating
(1 customer review)

4.00 out of 5 based on 1 customer rating
(1 customer review)

Description:

Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed, reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Hours and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu. Rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse or this true.
The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother’s basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.
In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away – the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder – are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.

134
English
Genre, Literature & Fiction

About The Author

Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including ‘A Home at the End of the World’, ‘Flesh and Blood’, ‘The Hours’ (winner of the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), ‘Specimen Days’ and ‘By Nightfall’, as well as ‘Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown’. He lives in New York.


1 review for The Wild Swan and Other Tales

  1. 4 out of 5

    Good Read

    Cunningham begins by asking who wouldn’t want to mess up the perfect lives of the fairy tale heroes and heroines, because wouldn’t doing that make the lives of us imperfect mortals a little easier? He reveals a hostility to the idea that only the beautiful and perfect can have happy endings, and that’s kind of intriguing for someone who was never one of the beautiful, popular, perfect peopl.
    This collection of reworked fairy tales provides the same emotional wallop as a marathon of Pixar shorts. The storytelling here is direct, unsurprising, yet highly effective. If you’re a reader looking for “”fairy tales with a twist,”” I’d suggest something else.

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