Twice Told Tales

Presents two tales from the Brothers Grimm, combined with Mr. Fox's highly unusual interpretations of them.

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow. In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual. Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time. Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

Twice Told Tales are not only for the young. Many have discovered the "magnificent, colorful, many-sided, fantasy world of fairy tales" as children, but, as Hans Dieckmann points out, we can rediscover their value as adults. "As with all great art, the fairy tale's deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life." (Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment) By the use of case histories, Dr. Dieckmann recounts ways in which "the greatest treasures of the soul" can be revealed in fairy tales. He graphically shows how fairy tales can give "color and vivacity to a life grown empty, sterile, and desolate." Dr. Dieckmann interprets the symbolic significance of many individual fairy tales and relates their meaning to various stages of a person's development.

Every book tells a story . . . And the 70 titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth and quality that formed part of the original Penguin vision in 1935 and that continue to define our publishing today. Together, they tell one version of the unique story of Penguin Books. Jorge Luis Borges wrote playful and deeply imaginative short stories that explore philosophy, paradox and the nature of existence, and Penguin Modern Classics introduced many of his most famous works, including Labyrinths, The Aleph and Fictions, to a wide audience. This collection includes seven of his most famous tales, which intrigue, inspire and mesmerize through their singular genius.

This volume of short stories and shorter works by Nathaniel Hawthorne was heralded upon its release and is still widely considered a classic.