New Release: "Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World" SurLaLune Fairy Tales Series Vol (Happy Book Birthday Heidi!)

It's here! And it's available in both ebook and paperback.

I can't describe how excited I am about these SurLaLune Fairy Tales Series volumes Heidi has been working on and I know this one is dear to her heart.

She is having a special Beauty and the Beast week on the SurLaLune blog to celebrate and started by giving us a lot of information on what we can look forward to in the book.

Rather than link you to buy directly from here, I know sales from Heidi's links help her fund her research via her affiliate agreement with Amazon so please click through to buy from her blog in particular. I'll just link you to her. :)

Here are some of the book-related posts you will enjoy reading (if you haven't already):

Table of Contents for Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World

This is all you should need to convince you to order this book ASAP. This collection should make you squeal like it's a fairy tale Christmas.

Beauty and the Beast and Me

This post is not to be missed! Here Heidi generously explains her love of Beauty and the Beast, how this love began, how it was nurtured and why she's still fascinated with the tale today.

Beauty and the Beast and Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve

This post includes details on this new and wonderful resource:

Including both translations felt important, so I gave up 121 pages in Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World to them, 15% of the book. So now they are in one place for comparison and contrast. I even added footnotes to help cross reference the transformation scene in both which is significantly different as I described in my intro.

Beauty and the Beast and Madame Beaumont

This post explains the governess mentalities of Madame Beaumont and how, in a parallel to adaptations of tales done for Victorian nurseries, she adapted the story for children's ears.

Then she's also summarized for us her recommended reading if you're studying Beauty and the Beast:

Beauty and the Beast: Recommended Reading Part I

Beauty and the Beast: Recommended Reading Part II

Beauty and the Beast: Recommended Reading Part III

Heidi never fails to be a font of truly amazing resources for serious students, writers and scholars of fairy tales. If you haven't availed yourself of any of the books in her series yet, do yourself a favor and start collecting them. 

Here are the covers from the collection to date (and now we can add a Beauty and the Beast volume too).

You won't be disappointed. They are worth every cent! 

As a complete aside, don't you think these covers would make an amazing library frieze?

And I cannot wait for The Grateful Dead collection. Check the cover and blurb from the SurLaLune website below. Heidi originally planned to release this one for Samhain/Halloween this year (I know - I'm being TOTALLY greedy right now but this is on my WANT! list..), but that was before her Beauty and the Beast collection was completed. Either way we should see it in the near(ish) future, depending on how crazy-busy Heidi is these days.

In the meantime:

HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY HEIDI!

Hint: if you're thinking about expanding your library with this series, you can help encourage and fund Heidi's research by buying via her blog links. Let's help keep this woman writing!

Wonders & Marvels Fairy Tale Week - Some Giveaways Finishing Tonight!

I should have posted on this earlier but got distracted sorry. Was just reminded by SurLaLune... (thank you Heidi!)

For those who don't already know, the awesome site Wonders & Marvels is having a fairy tale week with articles (I've just caught up on everything - fabulous stuff) and awesome giveaways. Some of those finish TONIGHT at midnight EST!

Hurry!
CLICK HERE TO GO THERE!

Read, comment, enjoy and you might win something too.This is one of the best fairy tale themed weeks I've seen with excellent articles and books for those who love and study fairy tales - especially the old ones. Curious about the image here? It's discussed in Heidi Anne Heiner's article there today "Five Great Fairy Tales You've Never Read".

Go HERE - quick!

Faeries and Fairy Tales at Dragon*Con This Weekend

Our fairy tale comrade-at-arms, Heidi Anne Heiner of SurLaLune, will talking about fairy tales at Dragon*Con in Atlanta this weekend! (For those who don't know, Dragon*Con is the world's largest fantasy and sci-fi convention.)

The panel "Faeries and Fairy Tales" will be happening at:
8:30pm on the 5th (Saturday)
and Heidi is one of the guest panelists.

Panel description:

Faeries and Fairy Tales : Something old, something new, something borrowed and something Blue Fairy? What bits of mythology, folklore, and fairy tales are in stories today? Guests: Susan Fichtelberg, Maggie Stiefvater, Gillian Summers (Berta Platas & Michelle Roper), Steve Berman and Heidi Anne Heiner

If you are attending, please make sure you go say 'hi' to Heidi and attend the panel. We want to hear everything! Heidi has promised a full report of the highlights on her return so keep checking the SurLaLune blog for that.

New Ebook from Heidi Anne Heiner of SurLaLune: "Frog Prince and Other Frog Tales From Around the World"

Heidi Anne Heiner, long-time fairy tale advocate/ambassador and the genius (and incredibly tireless worker) behind-the-scenes of one of the best fairy tale resources on the web - SurLaLune - has been busy working on a new series of books and just released her first one on August 19th.In perfect timing with the current buzz about princes masquerading as amphibians (thanks to Disney's upcoming animated feature "The Princess and the Frog" in December), this volume is titled: "The Frog Prince and Other Frog Tales From Around the World".

This is super exciting, as the tales in these collections can't be found - either put together or the complete texts of such - anywhere else on the web!

Heidi was kind enough to give me permission to re-publish her blog entry here at Once Upon A Blog:

Last week I announced a new series of "Women in Folklore" books I'm publishing in Kindle eformat and potentially in paper versions, too. The first volume in the series is The Fairy Tale Fiction of Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie. You can read all about the format choices and thinking behind this series at the original post here.

This week I've also launched the first book in the SurLaLune Fairy Tale Series, The Frog Prince and Other Frog Tales From Around the World. For now it is available in Kindle format only, but I am working on other formats. (If you have a preference, please post or email me so I know where the demand is focused.)

Here's the description:

From wise creatures to hapless victims, frogs appear in numerous stories around the world. Edited with an introduction by Heidi Anne Heiner of SurLaLune Fairy Tales, this volume contains over 100 fairy tales, fables, myths and ballads about frogs from around the world, including several variants of the well-known Frog Prince tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm and most recently adapted into a feature-length animated film by Disney. The book is divided into several sections, including “Frog Kings, Princes and Bridegrooms,” “Frog Brides,” “Frog Wooing and Courting,” “More Frog Tales,” and “Fables.” Also included is Mark Twain’s famous short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

This book is much more involved on my part since I spent many weeks researching and then editing and formatting the texts. I searched hundreds of books and found roughly 100 tales about frogs to include in this volume, including tales that stand alone and others that are variants of each other. Most of these tales are not available on SurLaLune nor are they gathered in such a large collection anywhere else on the web or in print. I've also written short introductions to many of them in addition to the expanded article I've included as an introduction to the entire collection.

You can find the rest of the entry discussing publishing options, upcoming installments and the wonderful work her graphic artist husband did with the covers HERE.Please go support Heidi's amazing work, both with SurLaLune and these wonderful new series. Her blog (also focusing on fairy tales) is HERE, the website (very possibly my favorite on the web) is HERE and you can buy some wonderful products HERE (at CafePress) and HERE (at Zazzle), all of which help pay for the running costs of the site, which we sincerely need to stay active and available!

As for the ebook, Heidi has told me PDFs are on the way, so for all of us still without a Kindle, we'll be able to get our own copy very soon. In the meantime, here's a 'teaser' (from Amazon.com):

From the introduction:

A FROG with a crown on its head. A girl kissing a frog. If you pay attention, you’ll notice the images appear frequently in the world around you. These and other variations — many humorous — appear on t-shirts, in advertisements, on book covers and novelty items to name just a few. Their shorthand message: You have to kiss a lot of frogs to meet your prince. Just about anyone will tell you it’s from a fairy tale, some may be able to tell you the story. Not many people know that the familiar story isn’t really an old tale but a fairly new variation of several tales that have been circulating for centuries.

‘And so the princess kissed the frog, turning him into a prince before her very eyes.’ A frog transformed into a prince with a kiss. That’s how “The Frog Prince” fairy tale ends in modern popular culture, but it’s not the way our ancestors knew the tale. Most often, violence was the key to ending the enchantment in the earliest known versions traced back to Scotland and Germany.

The Scottish tale is most familiarly known as “The Well of the World’s End” and first appeared in print in The Complaynt of Scotland in 1549, predating Shakespeare. The title is romantic, but not nearly as easy to remember as our more familiar “The Frog Prince.” The tale is considerably different, but obviously related to the tale of today.

You can also find a whole set of pages at SurLaLune dedicated to the tale of The Frog King, or Iron Henry (also known as The Frog Prince) HERE.

From us all, Heidi, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all your work with and for fairy tales. We're very lucky to have you on the fairy tale team!