The Tale of Tales ─ Or Entertainment for Little Ones

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days

Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from Naples, Italy, whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of fairy tales.The Tale of Tales opens with Princess Zoza, unable to laugh no matter how funny the joke. Her father, the king, attempts to make her smile; instead he leaves her cursed, whereupon the prince she is destined to marry is snatched up by another woman. To expose this impostor and win back her rightful husband, Zoza contrives a storytelling extravaganza: fifty fairy tales to be told by ten sharp-tongued women (including Zoza in disguise) over five days.

Funny and scary, romantic and gruesome—and featuring a childless queen who devours the heart of a sea monster cooked by a virgin, then gives birth the very next day; a lecherous king aroused by the singing of a woman, whom he courts unaware of her physical grotesqueness; and a king who raises a flea to monstrous size on his own blood, sparking a contest in which an ogre vies with men for the hand of the king’s daughter—The Tale of Talesis a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature.

Giambattista Basile (1575–1632) was born to a middle-class family just outside of Naples, Italy. A poet, academic, and court administrator, he is best remembered for recording the first national collection of fairy tales, published by his sister two years after his death.

Nancy L. Canepa (translator) is an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College.

Jack Zipes (foreword) is a preeminent fairy tale scholar who has written, translated, or edited dozens of books, includingThe Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. He is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.