The Turnip Princess

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales

“With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales—the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen—becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost—until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manu­scripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.” –Amazon.com

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“The tales are fascinating— . . . they have all their original, fiercely oddball appeal.” —NPR, “Best Books of the Year”

“Bawdier, racier and significantly more scatological than the collection the Grimms published.” —Laura Miller, Salon

“This stunning fairy-tale find is grimmer than Grimm. . . . Here is real treasure. Just watch out for the witch.” —The Washington Post

“Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.” —The New Yorker

“In the hands of renowned folklorist and scholar Maria Tatar, these seventy-two stories come to life with a snappy matter-of-factness, racing with palpable energy through fantasy landscapes that always feel close to home.” —NPR.org

“Lively and lucid.” —Marina Warner, The New York Review of Books

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[A] parade of giants, gnomes, kings, and witches . . . Anyone familiar with Disney or the Grimms will be surprised by these brief, enigmatic tales. . . . They teach us to read for the simple thrill of the tales themselves, their humor and their zest. . . . In their simple charm and wild imagination they remind us of the foundation of literature itself: the impulse to entertain.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[This] new collection of German folk stories . . . challenges preconceptions about many of the most commonly known fairytales. . . . Many of the stories centre around surprisingly emancipated female characters.” —The Guardian

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