The Tale of Tales
Penguin Audio Classics
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About this listen
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over five days.
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a 17th-century poet from Naples, Italy, 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, Zoza contrives a storytelling extravaganza: 50 fairy tales to be told by 10 sharp-tongued women (including Zoza in disguise) over five days.
Funny and scary, romantic and gruesome - and featuring a childless queen who devours the heart of a sea monster cooked by a virgin, and who then gives birth the very next day; a lecherous king aroused by the voice of a woman whom he courts, unaware of her physical grotesqueness; and a king who raises a flea to monstrous size on his own blood, sparking a contest in which an ogre vies with men for the hand of the king's daughter - The Tale of Tales is a fairy-tale treasure that prefigures Game of Thrones and other touchstones of worldwide fantasy literature.
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- Narrated by: Emma Fenney, Phil Gigante, Erin Yuen
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness. Readily accessible by children, they present lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity that appeal to mature listeners as well. This collection of 18 tales includes "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Princess and the Pea", and "The Snow Queen".
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Zorba the Greek
- By: Nikos Kazantzakis
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A wonderful tale of a young man’s coming of age, Zorba the Greek has been a classic of world literature since it was first translated into English in 1952 and made into an unforgettable movie with Anthony Quinn. Zorba, an irrepressible, earthy hedonist, sweeps his young disciple along as he wines, dines, and loves his way through a life dedicated to fulfilling his copious appetites. Zorba is irresistible in this charming audio production by veteran narrator George Guidall.
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Drink life to the lees
- By Scot Potts on 04-25-13
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Mirror Mirror
- By: Gregory Maguire
- Narrated by: John McDonough, Kate Forbes, Barbara Rosenblat, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives at Montefiore, the farm of her father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up to the farm. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia, no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a quest, he leaves Bianca under the care of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but salvation can be found in the dark forest as well.
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Interesting re-telling of the fairy tale.
- By Patricia on 03-04-10
By: Gregory Maguire
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A Vision of Light
- A Margaret of Ashbury Novel, Book 1
- By: Judith Merkle Riley
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Margaret of Ashbury wants to write her life story. However, like most women in 14th-century England, she is illiterate. Three clerics contemptuously decline to be Margaret’s scribe, and only the threat of starvation persuades Brother Gregory, a Carthusian friar with a mysterious past, to take on the task. As she narrates her life, we discover a woman of startling resourcefulness.
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Old fashioned heroine
- By Margaret on 06-22-13
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The Cloven Viscount
- Translated by Archibald Colquhoun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.
By: Italo Calvino
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Candide (AudioGO Edition)
- By: Voltaire
- Narrated by: Jack Davenport
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When first published in 1759, Candide became an instant best seller and is now regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. Voltaire’s preoccupations with evil and with various kinds of human folly and intolerance found a perfect vehicle in this philosophical tale. A master storyteller, he combined often wildly entertaining action with profoundly serious sense, parodying the traditional chivalric and oriental tales with which his public was more familiar.
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Guaranteed to keep you smiling if not LOL
- By Robert on 08-09-12
By: Voltaire
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The Town House
- By: Norah Lofts
- Narrated by: Juliet Prague, Martyn Read
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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"It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me… the man whose lightest word was to us, his villeins, weightier than the King’s law or the edicts of our Holy Father…” So began the story of Martin Reed - a serf whose resentment of the automatic rule of his feudal lord finally flared into open defiance.
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Another winner by Norah Lofts
- By Bird Lady 147 on 10-03-17
By: Norah Lofts
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The Arabian Nights (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Andrew Lang
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The vengeful King Schahriar agrees to stave off the execution of Queen Scheherazade until she finishes a particularly compelling story. Her plan? Bleed one tale into another. Through fanciful histories, romances, tragedies, comedies, poems, riddles, and songs, Scheherazade prolongs her life by holding the king’s rapt attention. With origins in Persian and Eastern Indian folklore, the stories of The Arabian Nights have been reworked, reshaped, revised, collected, and supplemented throughout the centuries by various authors and scholars.
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Very edited version
- By HDVE on 11-13-18
By: Andrew Lang
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The Architect's Apprentice
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Piter Marek
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1540, 12-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan's menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan's beautiful daughter Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire's chief architect, who takes Jahan under his wing as they construct (with Chota's help) some of the most magnificent buildings in history.
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I feel like I should like it more than I do
- By nyog on 04-19-17
By: Elif Shafak
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Birds Without Wings
- By: Louis de Bernieres
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds Without Wings is the story of a small town in Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the men and women (Armenians, Christians, and Muslims) whose lives are intertwined and rooted there: Iskander, the potter and local fount of wisdom; Philotei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted almost from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherd, a great love that culminates in tragedy and madness; and many more.
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Not for the faint of heart
- By a on 01-03-05
What listeners say about The Tale of Tales
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Laura
- 05-19-16
if your a fan of folk fairytales
This is a good read if you a fan of folklore and old style fairy tales. It can drag in places and some stories are similar but accurate. The style is archaic and you may think the only monsters on earth are ogres. performance was good with character voices and flow.
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- John
- 04-29-17
Farts, Tarts and Body Parts
For years I have been hoping someone would record Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. That hasn’t happened yet, but this is just as good. Maybe even better.
Many of the stories Calvino re-told are recognizable here, though in their less family-friendly, more eschatological 17th Century forms. Farts, tarts and body parts abound. But the visceral is only one facet of an overwhelmingly vigorous range of expression. While I’ve added substantially to my arsenal of invective, there’s also no end of artful circumlocution here (a king warns a suitor for his daughter’s hand that if he fails the test, “your hood will lose its shape”). And I never dreamed there were so many ways of saying the sun rose, the moon was full, the stars came out, people talked or dinner was served.
Sometimes a colloquial expression or contemporary allusion crops up that, if I were reading, would send me to the footnotes—thus breaking the flow of the story. Being swept along on the tide of superb narration, I either guess at the meaning from the context or just let it go. After decades spent flipping dutifully to the notes, I’m beginning to think this new method is the secret to a happy literary life.
It goes without saying that the tales (and the uber-tale that frames them) is a sheer delight. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of these stories is that virtue—hard work, honesty, generosity—gets rewarded every time. Basile intended these stories for the amusement of children (at least, he says he did), but we of the older set can find solace here as well. Especially in the morals that cap off every tale, such as: “God finds a port for a desperate boat”.
Worried that, in the interest of bloviated scholarship—the exploration of class and gender, etc.—this recording would include the voluminous introductions and forewords that kick off the paginated version, I put off this purchase for some time. But fear not. We dive straight into the tales without a single politically correct whimper or post-post-modern academic snivel.
There are only two downsides. First, in a work whose entertainment value depends upon the surprise and delight that only idiotic sons, beautiful maidens, charmed animals, and ogres and faeries who just happen to live next door can give, the producers recorded the short summaries that appear before every tale. Again, if I were reading I’d just skip. In an audiobook, some deft fast forwarding is advised if you don’t want to spoil the fun. Secondly, the eclogues that finish off the first four days' entertainment, while interesting, haven’t aged as well as the tales.
The narration is superb. Simon Vance is, as usual, delightful. And of the many different storytellers there’s not one who I’d banish to the Ogre’s stew pot.
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- Joleen
- 05-20-18
Extremely Vulgar
extremely vulgar, struggled to get past first few chapters, NOT for children at ALL, NO liked
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