Heidi Anne Heiner's Blog, page 68

New Release: Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin by Sue Short

(US/UK Links)
Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin by Sue Short was released in late December although it has a 2015 release date. It is also available in the UK at Fairy Tale and Film: Old Tales with a New Spin (UK Link). I haven't seen a copy of it yet to explore the films discussed and share that with you here, but it appears to be a fine addition to the fairy tale films studies bibliography.

Book description:

How have familiar tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Beauty and the Beast', 'Ali Baba' and 'Bluebeard' been redeployed in film? Why has the industry taken such a keen interest in reworking age-old stories? And are the 3D star vehicles currently being released necessarily the most interesting examples? Paying particular attention to less conspicuous adaptations in order to question exactly what constitutes a 'fairy tale film', Sue Short argues that some of the most significant revisions can be found where we least expect them. She also seeks to challenge negative evaluations of popular cinema – and its audiences – by illustrating some progressive ideas at work in frequently undervalued texts. The book is intended for anyone interested in contemporary cinema, gender and class representation in popular culture – and lovers of fairy tales everywhere.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Introduction: Fairy Tale Films, Old Tales with a New Spin
1 Finding Love and Fulfilling Dreams: Aspiring Underdogs and Humbled Heroines
2 Curses, Wishes and Amazing Transformations: Male Maturation Tales
3 Wealth through Stealth: Evening the Odds, or Flirting with Disaster?
4 Dangerous Liaisons: Demon Lovers and Defiant Damsels
S Houses of Horror: Domestic Dangers and Man-made Monsters
6 Postmodern Revisions: New Tales for Old?
Epilogue: The Importance of Enchantment
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

TODAY ONLY: The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale for $1.99

The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale is on sale today for only $1.99 in ebook format. It has been on sale previously, but not recently. It is one of my favorite of Hale's books and inspired me to add Maid Maleen to the annotated tales on SurLaLune. The tale, the setting, the book are all unusual in fairy tale retelling novels.

This is one the Kindle Deals of the Day which also includes 5 Regency Romances by Georgette Heyer , some of my favorites by Heyer. None are fairy tale inspired but they are fun romps.

Book description:

Based on a classic Grimm's fairy tale, this is the story told by Dashti, a maid from the steppes of a medieval land, who sacrifices her freedom to accompany her mistress into exile. Imprisoned in a remote tower after Lady Saren refuses to marry the man her father has chosen, the maid and the lady have almost nothing in common. But the loyalty that grows between the two, the man they love in different ways for different reasons, and the lies they tell because of and in spite of each other, combine to evoke the deepest bonds, transcend the loneliest landscapes, and erupt in a conclusion so romantic, so clever, and so right that no reader will be left dry-eyed.

Bargain Ebook: The Princess in the Opal Mask by Jenny Lundquist for $1.99

The Princess in the Opal Mask by Jenny Lundquist is on sale for $1.99 in ebook format. The book is marketed as a Cinderella story but it seems to be more inspired by The Man in the Iron Mask. But just in case, I'll share here. It's part of Amazon's The Big Deal: Kindle Books Up to 85% Off through January 25th. It is the only novel in the sale related to fairy tales but there are some picture books.


Book description for The Princess in the Opal Mask:

“Somewhere in the kingdom of Galandria, someone knows my real name. . . .
Somewhere, someone must remember me, and my name.”

In the faraway land of Tulan, sixteen-year-old orphan Elara has spent her entire life trying to find out her real name. While she serves for the cruel and manipulative Ogden family, she feels that pertinent information about her past is being withheld. Meanwhile, in the kingdom of Galandria, Princess Wilha (known as “The Masked Princess”), is plagued with questions of her own. Despite being the most recognizable icon in the kingdom, why has she been forced to wear a mask every day since birth? And why won’t her own father, the king, explain why she must cover her face at all times?

When Elara and Wilha are brought face to face, an intimate connection is exposed, as well as answers that force them to play the part of the other. As both are thrust into lives they never knew existed, hidden conspiracies begin to surface, and the fate of two opposing kingdoms rests squarely on their untrained shoulders.

Follow two unforgettable journeys that lead these characters to roles they were always born to play.

Fairy Tales in Advertising: Essenciale Beauty Center: Multiple Tales

Essenciale Beauty Center: RapunzelEssenciale Beauty Center Home Service. Because sometimes you just can’t leave.
Again, fairy tales to advertise anything. Just anything. Clever concept and it also invokes the darker side of some tales that usually we don't consider. That Three Pigs image below isn't meant to be dark, but it has that overtone to me as I think about it. I had a visceral reaction to it for some reason. Homebound fairy tale characters, hmmm.... And my brain starts composing a story of an agoraphobic Rapunzel, too. Double hmmm....
Campaign info from Ads of the World:

Advertising Agency: DezNoveOito, Curitiba, Brazil
Creative Director: Fernando Baibich
Art Directors: Fábio Miranda, Pietro Domiciano
Copywriter: Bruno Trindade
Illustrator: Lucas Parolin
Published: September 2012


Essenciale Beauty Center: Three little pigsEssenciale Beauty Center Home Service. Because sometimes you just can’t leave.

Bargain Ebook: The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley for $1.99

The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley has dropped to $1.99 in ebook format from $6.39. I imagine this is a temporary drop so get it while you can. I am on a quest to get the entire Robin McKinley ebook library at reasonable prices since I already own them all in hardcover copies and can't justify a sweeping purchase of them at full price. I enjoyed this one when it was first released and I was a very eager teenager. Crazy to think how many years ago that was now...

Book description:

The Robin Hood legend comes thrillingly alive in Robin McKinley’s reimagining of the classic adventure

Young Robin Longbow, subapprentice forester in the King’s Forest of Nottingham, must contend with the dislike of the Chief Forester, who bullies Robin in memory of his popular father. But Robin does not want to leave Nottingham or lose the title to his father’s small tenancy, because he is in love with a young lady named Marian—and keeps remembering that his mother too was gentry and married a common forester.

Robin has been granted a rare holiday to go to the Nottingham Fair, where he will spend the day with his friends Much and Marian. But he is ambushed by a group of the Chief Forester’s cronies, who challenge him to an archery contest . . . and he accidentally kills one of them in self-defense.

He knows his own life is forfeit. But Much and Marian convince him that perhaps his personal catastrophe is also an opportunity: an opportunity for a few stubborn Saxons to gather together in the secret heart of Sherwood Forest and strike back against the arrogance and injustice of the Norman overlords.

Art Thursday: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge by G. Delau

Today's Art Thursday is Le Petit Chaperon Rouge by G. Delau.

'Le Petit Chaperon Rouge' or as we know her best in English, Little Red Riding Hood, encounters the German wolf. I couldn't find any reliable information on this piece with some quick research. But it is fascinating.

Riding Hood, Delau Buy From Art.com

New Book: Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber by Kimberly J. Lau

Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber by Kimberly J. Lau was released last month. It is the most recent offering in the excellent Series in Fairy-Tale Studies from Wayne State University Press.

From the subtitle, you can see that the book is about Angela Carter, the hands down favorite in literary fairy tale studies. She provides much scope for discussion in her slim volume of stories, The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories. Lau's book provides an excellent discussion of Carter's tales. So once again, if you are not familiar with Carter's work, you should be. It's not comfortable reading and is certainly provocative, but it resonates decades later.

Book description:

In the thirty-five years since the publication of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales have inspired an impressive body of criticism. Yet none has addressed the ways her fairy tales grapple with and seek to overcome the near impossibility of heterosexual love and desire under patriarchy. In Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, author Kimberly J. Lau argues that the strangeness of Carter’s fairy-tale enchantments—the moments when love or erotic desire escape the deeply familiar, habitual structures and ideologies that contain them—show the momentary, fleeting possibilities for heterosexual love and desire.

Lau begins by situating her reading of The Bloody Chamber—as individual stories and as a collection—within and against the critical literature, especially that which addresses Carter’s relationship to psychoanalytic theory and issues of language and desire. In chapter 2, she illustrates Carter’s construction of gender and language as labyrinthine structures—complex cultural edifices constructed and augmented over time. She moves on to consider Carter’s "feline stories" in chapter 3—"The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," "The Tiger’s Bride," and "Puss-in-Boots"—as an initial move away from the labyrinthine structures and toward an alternate erotics. In chapter 4, she reads "The Erl-King" and "The Snow Child" as another pair of mirrored tales, while chapter 5 elaborates on the pedophilic and necrophiliac fantasies of a pornographic culture, introduced in the previous chapter with the Count’s desire for the Snow Child. In chapter 6, Lau situates Carter’s three concluding stories—the wolf trilogy—within the context of feminist psychoanalytic understandings of infidelity as that which destabilizes patriarchal hegemonies and constructs.

Lau argues that Carter’s "erotic infidelities" work against our culturally determined expectations and longings and usher us into welcome new enchantments. Situated at the intersection of feminist, psychoanalytic, literary, and fairy-tale studies, readers interested in a variety of scholarly disciplines as well as scholars of Carter’s tales will enjoy Lau’s look at enduring questions of gender, sexuality, and desire.

Kimberly J. Lau is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden and Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women’s Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics.

The Librarians and the Fables of Doom

The Librarians is a new series on TNT here in the US. I tried it out because, as a librarian, I'm always interested to see how we are portrayed in pop culture. It's a thing for librarians, the majority of which are not buttoned up, bespectacled spinsters with a shushing finger and obsession with cats. I admit to the often bespectacled and occasionally buttoned up myself though, but I am far from typical and much less interesting than most of the librarians I've known.

Episode 6, And the Fables of Doom, aired this past Sunday night and it has A LOT of fun fairy tale references in it from Emperor's New Clothes to Little Red Riding Hood to a troll under a bridge in Three Billy Goats Gruff--and that's all in the first ten minutes. Anyway, if you are in the US, the episode is available to stream online for free for a month or so, so I am providing a link. There's a list of 57 fairy tale magical items from fairy tales and folklore and some overall kitsch, but it's fun overall. I'd consider the series from what I've seen so far--I've not watched them all--to be family safe, fine for most school age kids and up. There is some jeopardy and violence but not to the levels of say, Doctor Who or any of the superhero shows on right now. Yes, I watch Arrow and Flash regularly with the hubby.

Episode description:

Near a small town in Washington, a truck is thrown off a bridge and the clipping book sends the Librarians to investigate. They find that the event was caused by a troll, and that other strange events have been occurring in the town, each fitting into the pattern of a well-known fairy tale. The cause is traced to an old book that has recently come into the possession of the town's own librarian (René Auberjonois). The Librarians must race to stop the effect even as they themselves are swept into the stories.

The link to the episode is at http://www.tntdrama.com/shows/the-librarians/season-1/episode-6/and-the-fables-of-doom.html

And here are some preview videos:

Today Only: Bargain Ebook: Cinder & Ella by Kelly Oram

Cinder & Ella by Kelly Oram is on sale in ebook format TODAY ONLY for $1.99. This is one of the more unusual Cinderella retellings I've seen in a while--probably not the taste of a lot of readers here--but I find it interesting thanks to just that. And the reader reviews are overwhelmingly positive. I discovered the a month or so ago and added it to my watch list and to my list of books to post about. I didn't expect it to end up as a Kindle Deal of the Day so soon!

Book description:

Cinder458: Your blogaversary is coming up, right?
EllaTheRealHero: Do all those Hollywood friends of yours know you use words like blogaversary?
Cinder458: Of course not. I need your address. Got you a blogaversary present.

Cinder got me a gift?
My heart flipped.
Not that I was in love with my Internet best friend or anything. That would be utterly ridiculous. The boy was cocky and stubborn and argued with everything I said just to be infuriating. He also had lots of money, dated models—which meant he had to be hot—and was a closet book nerd.
Funny, rich, hot, confident, book lover. Definitely not my type. Nope. Not at all.
Yeah, okay, fine, so he wasn’t my type by default because he lived in California and I live in Massachusetts. Whatever.

Cinder458: Hello? Ella?? Address??
EllaTheRealHero: I don’t give out my address to creepy Internet stalkers.
Cinder458: I guess you don’t want this autographed first-edition hardback of The Druid Prince, then. Shame. I had it signed it to Ellamara when I met L.P. Morgan at FantasyCon last week, so I can’t try to impress any other girls with it.

Not my type.
Not. My. Type.

What would you do if your anonymous Internet best friend turned out to be Hollywood’s hottest celebrity?

It’s been almost a year since eighteen-year-old Ella Rodriguez was in a car accident that left her crippled, scarred, and without a mother. After a very difficult recovery, she’s been uprooted across the country and forced into the custody of a father that abandoned her when she was a young child. If Ella wants to escape her father’s home and her awful new stepfamily, she must convince her doctors that she’s capable, both physically and emotionally, of living on her own. The problem is, she’s not ready yet. The only way she can think of to start healing is by reconnecting with the one person left in the world who’s ever meant anything to her—her anonymous Internet best friend, Cinder.

Hollywood sensation Brian Oliver has a reputation for being trouble. There’s major buzz around his performance in his upcoming film The Druid Prince, but his management team says he won’t make the transition from teen heartthrob to serious A-list actor unless he can prove he’s left his wild days behind and become a mature adult. In order to douse the flames on Brian’s bad-boy reputation, his management stages a fake engagement for him to his co-star Kaylee. Brian isn’t thrilled with the arrangement—or his fake fiancée—but decides he’ll suffer through it if it means he’ll get an Oscar nomination. Then a surprise email from an old Internet friend changes everything.

With a heartwarming online celebrity romance reminiscent of Jennifer E. Smith’s This Is What Happy Looks Like, bestselling young adult author Kelly Oram has struck gold with her new adult contemporary retelling of the timeless classic Cinderella.

New Release: Princess of Thorns by Stacey Jay

(US/UK Links)
Princess of Thorns by Stacey Jay was released last month and I didn't get a post up about it. It was also released in the UK, see it at Princess of Thorns (UK Link). I received an ARC of it and it's a fun book with Sleeping Beauty inspiration and some Swan Lake and Rapunzel thrown into the mix, too. Highly recommended.

Book description:

Game of Thrones meets the Grimm’s fairy tales in this twisted, fast-paced romantic fantasy-adventure about Sleeping Beauty’s daughter, a warrior princess who must fight to reclaim her throne.

Though she looks like a mere mortal, Princess Aurora is a fairy blessed with enhanced strength, bravery, and mercy yet cursed to destroy the free will of any male who kisses her. Disguised as a boy, she enlists the help of the handsome but also cursed Prince Niklaas to fight legions of evil and free her brother from the ogre queen who stole Aurora’s throne ten years ago.

Will Aurora triumph over evil and reach her brother before it’s too late? Can Aurora and Niklaas break the curses that will otherwise forever keep them from finding their one true love?