Once upon a time ...
Fairytales are a universal part of childhood. No matter what time or what place you grew up, you have at one point or another heard that classic phrase “once upon a time.” They are usually the first stories we ever hear or read. These types of tales set us up to understand the art of stories and storytelling, and they are certainly worth revisiting.
Here in The Blue Fairy Book, the first of Andrew Lang’s beloved collections of classic fairy stories, you will return to the tales you already know like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” tales you maybe remember a bit different like “The Story of Pretty Goldilocks” and “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” and some you may never have heard of like “The White Cat” and “Prince Darling.”
Lang is an author of multivolume history books about Scotland and English literature, and he is considered one of the top folklorists in England. In The Blue Fairy Book, he has compiled thirty-seven tales from Arabian Nights, Charles Perrault, The Brothers Grimm, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, and more, in a first-rate English language collection.
Full contents:
“The Bronze Ring”“Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess”“East of the Sun and West of the Moon”“The Yellow Dwarf”“Little Red Riding Hood”“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”“Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper”“Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”“The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was”“Rumpelstiltskin”“Beauty and the Beast”“The Master-Maid”“Why the Sea Is Salt”“The Master Cat; Or, Puss in Boots”“Felicia and the Pot of Pinks”“The White Cat”“The Water-Lily. The Gold-Spinners”“The Terrible Head”“The Story of Pretty Goldilocks”“The History of Whittington”“The Wonderful Sheep”“Little Thumb”“The Forty Thieves”“Hansel and Gretel”“Snow-White and Rose-Red”“The Goose-Girl”“Toads and Diamonds”“Prince Darling”“Blue Beard”“Trusty John”“The Brave Little Tailor”“A Voyage to Lilliput”“The Princess on the Glass Hill”“The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou”“The History of Jack the Giant-Killer”“The Black Bull of Norroway”“The Red Etin”
Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a Scottish man of letters educated at the Edinburgh Academy, St. Andrews, and Balliol College, Oxford, became a prolific and versatile London journalist. He took a leading part in the controversy with Max Müller and his school about the interpretation of mythology and folk tales. He published several volumes of verse and several solid contributions to the study of the philosophy and religion of primitive man. He also wrote the four-volume History of Scotland, A History of English Literature, and many fairy-tale collections, as well as works on Homer, Joan of Arc, Scott, Lockhart, Mary Stuart, John Knox, Prince Charlie, Tennyson, and others.
Roxanne Hernandez is an audio narrator and a top narrator choice for young adult, adult drama, and Latin American/Chicano literature. She was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2011.
Gabrielle de Cuir, award-winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. She was a cowinner of the Audie Award for best narration in 2011 and a three-time finalist for the Audie and has garnered six AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her “velvet touch” as an actor’s director has earned her a special place in the audiobook world as the foremost producer for bestselling authors and celebrities.
Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and a multiaward-winning narrator, named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices.
Justine Eyre has turned her passion for reading and remarkable facility with accents into her dream career. This classically trained, multilingual actress has narrated well over 400 audiobooks and has been honored to receive a coveted Audie Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. Appearing in leading roles onstage in King Lear and The Crucible, she has also graced the screen in Two and Half Men and Mad Men amongst her many television credits.
Orson Scott Card, the author of the New York Times bestseller Ender’s Game, has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for his works of speculative fiction. His Ender novels are widely read by adults and younger readers and are increasingly used in schools. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy, American-frontier fantasy, biblical novels, poetry, plays, and scripts.
John Rubinstein is an actor, composer, and director who won a Tony Award for his starring role in Broadway’s Children of a Lesser God. He has narrated dozens of audiobooks, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards and being named a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2013.
Read by Paul Boehmer, Justine Eyre, Jim Meskimen, John Rubinstein, and Stefan Rudnicki
Mirron Willis—actor of film, stage, and television—is the winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2012 and a finalist for the Audie in 2015, as well as the winner of four AudioFile Earphones Awards for his audiobook recordings. He has worked extensively in film and television and on stage with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Houston Shakespeare Festival, and the Ensemble Theatre, among others. He has recorded some 150 audiobooks, including the Smokey Dalton series by Kris Nelscott and My Song by Harry Belafonte. He resides and records audiobooks on his family’s historic ranch in East Texas.