”The Fisherman and his Soul” is a fairy tale first published in November of 1891 in Wilde’s “A House of Pomegranates”. It tells of a fisherman who nets and falls in love with a mermaid. But to be with her he must shed his soul, which goes off to have adventures of its own. Will forbidden love endure?
This book, subtitled "How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore", is a collection of short stories, most of them etiologial myths from Brazilian Indian Folklore.
Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Price in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a famous work of fiction by Selma Lagerlöf, published in two parts in 1906 and 1907. The background for publication was a commission from the National Teachers Association in 1902 to write a geography reader for the public schools. "She devoted three years to Nature study and to familiarizing herself with animal and bird life. She has sought out hitherto unpublished folklore and legends of the different provinces. These she has ingeniously woven into her story." (From translator Velma Swanston Howard's introduction.
Arthur Ransome is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books. This is the only example of his fiction in the public domain in the United States. These stories are all from Russian folklore, some comparatively well-known, others less so. Ransome spent some years in Russia as a newspaper correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian and was peripherally involved in the revolution. In the late twenties he married Evgenia Shvelpina, Trotsky's secretary, retired from newspapers and started writing his children’s books.
The curious Case of Benjamin Button, a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, now a major motion picture, features Benjamin Button, who, born as an old man much to the dismay and chagrin of his father and family Doctor, ages backwards until he leaves this world as a newborn.
A collection of children's fairytales including the tale of how the griffin lost one eye and Can't Shan't and Don't Care came to be giants. 