These are the books the rest of fantasy is arguing with. Some are a century old, some older, and all of them established something the genre has been building on or pushing against ever since.
About this shelf
The Grimm brothers were philologists, not children's authors. They collected these tales to preserve a vanishing oral tradition, and the versions they wrote down still have their teeth. Lewis Carroll was a logician, which is why the nonsense in the Alice books is precise nonsense. L. Frank Baum set out to write an American fairy tale deliberately stripped of European menace, and produced something stranger than the film suggests.
William Goldman's The Princess Bride pretends to be an abridgement of a book that never existed, and runs the joke the entire length. Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn is a fairy tale that knows it's a fairy tale and grieves about it.
Where a title comes in multiple editions, we've noted which is which: scholarly apparatus, illustrated gift edition, or the cheap pocket copy meant to be read and reread.
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