Kim Kardashian – 2011 Angel Ball in New York, 12 more images after the break...
Monday, October 24, 2011
Top 50 Breakfast Around The World
01. English Breakfast
Breakfast as the main meal of the day. Different countries eat different breakfast dishes. Let’s take a look..
Top 50 best breakfast of the world...
Sleeping Beauty: Pop-Up Book by Louise Rowe
This one is for those across the pond from me. Those of us in the US will have to order foreign or wait a year. A new pop-up book release is Sleeping Beauty: Pop-Up Book
by Louise Rowe. I featured two of Rowe's previous fairy tales last year after they were released. You can read about them and see images of the pop-ups at Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. And those two books, by the way, are slated for an early December release here in the US. Here are some links followed by more images from Sleeping Beauty:
These images came from Rowe's website:
No, they are not as complex as Sabuda or Reinhart's work, but they are still magical and will enchant a child, too. Great gifts for the children or me although I already own Hansel and Gretel and LRRH from an order I placed last year.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Library Essentials Month: Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales edited by Jack Zipes
Beauties, Beasts and Enchantments: Classic French Fairy Tales
edited by Jack Zipes is today's library essential. Yes, there seems to be a Beauty and the Beast emphasis this weekend. This is one of the best collections of fairy tales from the French Salon period translated into English. It is the best way to access an English translation of Madame de Villeneuve's entire story of Beauty and the Beast which is actually novella length. Madame Le Prince de Beaumont's derivative of the tale--and the one we are most familiar with--is also in this edition. The small mass market paperback edition, Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales, does not have the Villeneuve version. Fortunately, the full version has been reprinted and is much easier to acquire and access. Zipes's introduction about the salons and the women who dominated them with their fairy tales is also excellent and a great introduction to the topic. Overall, an excellent book and not to be missed if you are interested in the literary history of some of our most popular fairy tales, including those of Charles Perrault which are included in this volume of 36 tales, too.
Description from the publisher:
BEAUTIES, BEASTS AND ENCHANTMENT: CLASSIC FRENCH FAIRY TALES
A new collection of 36 French fairy tales translated by renowned writer and authority on fairy tales, Jack Zipes. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleepy Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood are some of the classic fairy tales in this amazing book.
Includes illustrations from fairy tale collections.
'Terrific... a succulent array of 17th and 18th century 'salon' fairy tales'
- The New York Times Book Review
'These tales are adventurous, thrilling in a way fairy tales are meant to be... The translation from the French is modern, happily free of archaic and hyperbolic language... a fine and sophisticated collection'
- New York Tribune
'Enjoyable to read... a unique collection of French regional folklore'
- Library Journal
'Charming stories accompanied by attractive pen-and-ink drawings'
- Chattanooga Times
'An excellent collection'
- Booklist.
Library Essentials Month: Beauty by Robin McKinley
This post didn't push live on Saturday, so here it is now on Sunday:
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
by Robin McKinley is today's library essential and only one of two fiction titles on the list this month. I debated this one and then decided it is certainly one of my library essentials and it is always fun to add some fiction especially on a Saturday when nothing heavy is really wanted anyway.This is an essential to me because it was a very important book when I first read it decades ago, but still several years after its 1978 original publication date. I discovered it when I was about 13 or 14--I don't remember the time but know it was after I had read McKinley's The Hero and the Crown in one day while very sick (read a chapter, run to the bathroom, rinse, repeat). I was thrilled to have a novel written around my favorite fairy tale by a favorite author--anyone who can make me happy to be home from school while violently sick quickly becomes a favorite. I think an entire generation discovered this book and was inspired to write more retellings several years later because there were virtually no others in the early 80s. Well, I know of one other I bought during that time--Roses by Barbara Cohen, another Beauty and the Beast retelling that was enjoyable, but it was not Beauty. Then Terri Windling's FairyTale Series came along and started to fill in the gap for older readers. But I digress....
Anyway, this is a touchstone book for many authors and readers and inspired many future novels. Nowadays it tends to be underappreciated by the YA readers who have an abundance of choices and is now marketed primarily to a middle reader market that can still appreciate it. It's continued success and popularity helped establish a subgenre of fairy tale retellings. No, it wasn't the first to do so--that's been going on for decades--but there was a dearth of options for many years and none that sold like this one did which convinced publishes to buy and print similar titles. Publishing is a business, never forget. Everyone likes to eat.
Book description from the publisher:
A strange imprisonment
Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.
When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"
Robin McKinley's beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple: Beauty and the Beast.
Cinderella in Art
Here is our Sunday morning video of Cinderella in Art, courtesy of joshje777. This one is over 11 minutes long and worth every second. Check back next Sunday for the next in the series.
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