Giambattista Basile was a seventeenth-century Italian poet whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of fairy tales. The Tale of Tales opens with Princess Zoza, unable to laugh no matter how funny the joke. Her father, the king, attempts to make her smile; instead he leaves her cursed whereupon the prince she is destined to marry is snatched up by another woman. To expose this impostor and win back her rightful husband, Zosa contrives a storytelling extravaganza: fifty fairy tales to be told by ten sharp-tongued women (including Zoza in disguise) over five days. Funny and scary, romantic and gruesome, and featuring kings and queens, dragons and seduction, The Tale of Tales is a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature

Author Biography

Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) was born to a middle-class family just outside of Naples, Italy. A poet, academic, and court administrator, he is most remembered for collecting the first set of European fairy tales, published by his sister two years after his death. Jack Zipes (foreword) is a preeminent fairy tale scholar. He has written or edited dozens of books, including a complete translation of the first two editions of the Grimm fairy tales, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, published to great success in 2014. A retired professor of German at the University of Minnesota, he lives in Minnesota. Nancy L. Canepa (translator) is an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. Carmelo Lettere (illustrator) is an Italian artist.