The Annotated Brothers Grimm

Maria Tatar redefines the Grimm canon with this authoritative and entertaining collection.

The New York Times - Neil Gaiman

The Annotated Brothers Grimm treats the stories as something important -- not, in the end, because of what they tell us of the buried roots of Germanic myth, or because of the often contradictory and intermittently fashionable psychoanalytic interpretations, or for any other reason than that they are part of the way we see the world, because they should be told. That's what I took from it, anyway. But fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see.

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) is the author, along with his brother Wilhelm, of the classic tales of folklore and fantasy collectively known as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Also a librarian and dictionary writer, Jacob was an acclaimed linguist and academic who elaborated "Grimm's Law," a major historical breakthrough in the development of the study of linguistics.

Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) studied law in the early 1800s but became much better known as an accomplished and passionate storyteller and, with his brother Jacob, one of the Grimm Brothers, who gave the world the groundbreaking and fantastic collection of folklore, fairy stories, and fantasy tales we now call Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Maria Tatar chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood and many other books on folklore and fairy stories. She is also the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition and The Grimm Reader. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.