This story shows how foolish it is to take yourself too seriously.

The king’s daughter decided to marry the man who could best arrange his words. Two brothers, full of hope and well-prepared, set out to ask for her hand, when suddenly the third brother, Jack, joined them. They were surprised and laughed at him because he could not be as intelligent and know as much as they did and, of course, the princess would never marry Jack the Dullard... Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish author, poet and artist. Celebrated for children’s literature, his most cherished fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Match Girl". His books have been translated into every living language, and today there is no child or adult that has not met Andersen's whimsical characters. His fairy tales have been adapted to stage and screen countless times, most notably by Disney with the animated films "The Little Mermaid" in 1989 and "Frozen", which is loosely based on "The Snow Queen", in 2013. Thanks to Andersen's contribution to children's literature, his birth date, April 2, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.

Stories that have delighted children and fascinated adults for over a century are the heritage of Hans Christian Andersen. This collection has been selected and translated with the growing audience of adults--both students and general readers--in mind, and displays the full range of Andersen’s authorship, from parable to science fiction. In this fresh, contemporary translation Rossel and Conroy have endeavored to “preserve for the English-speaking audience the engaging duplicity of Andersen’s style, the tension of play between his sympathetic conversational tone and his use of the studied effect.” This is a tension between the simplicity of stories intended to be read aloud to children ad the subtlety of the allegory skillfully woven into each for the adults who would be listening and “must have something to think about,” as Andersen said. The introductions provide an overview of Andersen’s life and struggle to become an author, as well as an analysis of his contributions as an artist and storyteller. Each story has also been provided with an endnote giving publication dates, information about the genesis of the tale, and relevant comments by Andersen and other. Readers who remember with nostalgia such tales as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Match Girl” may be surprised to find the biting satire in many of the stories, such as “The Nightingale” and “The Gardener and the Lord and Lady,” the revealing self-portraits of the author in “The Sweethearts,” “The Butterfly,” and “The Shadow,” the mysticism of “The story of a Mother” and “The Bell” the prophetic quality of “In a Thousand Years Time,” and the complexity and charm of “the Snow Queen.” The book contains the drawings of Vilhelm Pedersen and Lorenz Frolich that originally appeared in the first illustrated Danish editions of Andersen’s tales and stories.

This definitive collection of work from Hans Christian Andersen—one of the immortals of world literature—not only includes his own notes to his stories but is the only version available in trade paperback that presents Andersen's fairy tales exactly as he collected them in the original Danish edition of 1874. Recognizing the literary merit of Andersen's own simple colloquial language, which Victorian translators and their imitators very often altered to sentimentalize or vulgarize, translator Erik Haugaard has remained faithful to the original text. The fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen wrote, such as "The Snow Queen," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Red Shoes," and "The Nightingale," are remarkable for their sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity, and they are like no others written before or since. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and retold folklore, Andersen adopted the most ancient literary forms of the fairy tale and the folktale and distilled them into a genre that was uniquely his own.

Else poisoned her husband as a token of her love for Erika. Alone in her prison cell Else relives who and what had brought her there – Erika and their secret language, Erika’s enabling mother, Else’s jealous mother-in-law, her abusive husband and his appalling secret, the words of oppression. “Elsechickgorgeousyou you are like a blank white sheet of paper on which I am the Word. You are like the nothingness that I first efface because I have Words to put into the emptiness. Because I am the Word so-to-say.”