Beauty and the Beast

[This] new book from Penguin … provides some historical context [to the Disney film] … Most of the stories about young women and animal grooms follow a predictable pattern … But the Penguin book also includes plenty of stories in which the genders are flipped, pairing young men with animal brides. * The New Yorker *The tales in Tatar’s compilation swing from vicious to romantic, from comedy to horror … Tatar’s book alone contains stories from almost two dozen countries. * NPR.org *A rich, intriguing volume highly recommended for fairy-tale fans. * Booklist *Maria Tatar’s new collection for Penguin Classics … ventur[es] deeper into the rich universe of animal bridegroom stories … There is also the parallel tradition of animal bride stories-swan maidens and selkies with a much sharper edge than The Little Mermaid … The source material here is much richer in possibilities than turning Belle into a crusader for women’s literacy. * Jezebel *Maria Tatar rounded up stories about animal brides and grooms from around the world in this new Penguin Classics collection, and while I am a certified fairy tale nerd, there was plenty in this book that was new to me. – Constance Grady * Vox *Superb … Each story is basically an expression of anxiety about marriage and relationships-about the animalistic nature of sex, and the fundamental strangeness of men and women to each other … Tatar points out, too, that every generation of monsters speaks to the anxieties of its time. * The Atlantic *

Maria Tatar (editor) is the John L. Loeb Professor of Folklore and Mythology and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of many acclaimed books, including The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, as well as the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Classic Fairy Tales- A Norton Critical Edition, The Grimm Reader, and The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.