TY - BOOK ID - 127271250 TI - The tale of tales or entertainment for little ones AU - Basile, Giambattista AU - Canepa, Nancy L AU - Zipes, Jack David AU - Lettere, Carmelo PY - 2016 SN - 0143129147 9780143129141 PB - New York: Penguin books, DB - UniCat KW - Fairy tales KW - Basile, Giambattista, - approximately 1575-1632 UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:127271250 AB - 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, and who then gives birth the very next day; a lecherous king aroused by the voice 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 Tales is a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature.-- A rollicking, bawdy collection of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over five days follows the compilation efforts of 17th-century Italian poet Giambattista Basile and traces the experiences of a cursed princess who would win back her betrothed ER -