The last book release by Contrarium is “Dark Fairy Tales”, a wonderful collection of lesser-known fairy tales. We chose stories that were a bit darker in tone, but not all are tragic and some are humorous too.
The volume includes three melancholy and not so well-known stories by Hans Christian Andersen, two darkly humorous stories by the Grimm Brothers whcih you may or may not have heard about, a fairy tale from Giambattista Basile’s wonderful and unfortunately not so well-known collection called “Pentamerone”, and a story by Charles Perrault that you’ve probably read before, although perhaps not in the original version. This last story is the only one that is probably more famous, but it was unavoidable to include it in a collection of “dark fairy tales”. Although, of course, many other tales could have been included.
For the illustrations we used colourized stills of German expressionist movies. It might seem an unusual combination, but the images surprisingly match the tone of the stories. This full colour, 64 page book is a real treat for both adults and children.
I personally always loved fairy tales, and even as an adult I still love to read them. I particularly like Andersen (The Snow Queen is one of my favourites), but Basile was a great recent discovery. Even though Perrault is considered the “grandfather of fairy tales”, Basile came before with his collection of folk tales published in 1634. Perhaps because it was written in Neapolitan it didn’t get so much attention; even today not so many people know about him. A recent movie by Mateo Garrone, “Tale of Tales” (2015) is based on his works, so perhaps this will help to popularize it.
The book can be purchased in both digital or print form at Amazon, or at our site shop.
