A collection of twenty-two fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, most translated into English for the first time, show the influence of German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and Eastern religion on his development as an author.

Eight stories about the distillation of wisdom, concerning dream worlds, magical thinking, the subconscious and the soul.

In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, Pictor's Metamorphoses, is the centerpiece of this anthology of Hesse's luminous short fiction. Based on The Arabian Nights and the work of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteen stories collected here represent a half century of Hesse's short writings. They display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy--as dream, fairy tale, satire, or allegory.

The fairy tale may be one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives – their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. For this new edition, the author has revised the work throughout and added a new introduction bringing this classic title up to date.

"Although life is an affair of light and shadows, we never accept it as such." Hermann Hesse Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language authors, his books are world literature classics. Hesse's great literary success is based on such works as The Glass Bead Game, Steppenwolf, Siddharta, Klingsor's Last Summer and Knulp. His books hold a special fascination for readers around the world. Hermann Hesse's Fairy Tales are seven short philosophical fictions written between 1913 and 1918, prior to and during the First World War. Still more relevant than ever, these philosophical fictions home in on the key questions of human existence and challenge conventional intellectual life and the orthodoxy of the world. Hesse's Fairy Tales deal with the dream world, the subconscious and the realm of magic. Full of images springing from Hesse's deep subconscious, the stories do not lend themselves to rational interpretation. They offer an exercise in spiritual detachment and allow their reader to gain perspective of what's really important in life.

Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller. Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the Brothers Grimm into metatheater, even metareflections. Snow White forgives the evil queen for trying to kill her, Cinderella doubts her prince and enjoys being hated by her evil stepsisters; the Fairy Tale itself is a character who encourages her to stay within the confines of the story. Sleeping Beauty, the royal family, and its retainers are not happy about being woken from their sleep by an absurd, unpretentious, Walser-like hero. Mary and Joseph are taken aback by what lies in store for their baby Jesus.

Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and inside out. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared in English. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales, this book gathers thirty-two stories written between 1925 and Schwitters's death in 1948--including a complete English-language recreation of The Scarecrow, a children's book illustrated with avant-garde typography that Schwitters created with Kate Steinitz and De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales also includes brilliant new illustrations that evoke the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Schwitters wrote these darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales at a time when traditional German fairy tales were being co-opted by the Nazis. Filled with sharp critiques of German life during the Weimar and early Nazi eras, Schwitters's tales are rich with absurdist events and insist that not everyone--and perhaps not anyone--lives happily ever after. In "Lucky Hans," the starving protagonist tries to catch a rabbit only to have it shed its fur like a coat and run off naked into the forest. In other tales, a sarcastic gypsy stands in for a fairy godmother and an army recruit is arrested for growing to monstrous size. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is a delightfully strange and surprising book.