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    A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
    A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
    A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
    Ebook120 pages2 hours

    A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

    By Michael Cunningham and Yuko Shimizu

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed, reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu. Rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.

    The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans.

    In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away – the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder – are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateNov 10, 2015
    ISBN9780008140410
    Author

    Michael Cunningham

    MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.

    Read more from Michael Cunningham

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    Reviews for A Wild Swan

    4/5

    89 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Magical and realistic and wonderful and hard to describe. Just go read it.
    • 4/5
      Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has re-imagined 10 fairy tales either by Hans Christian Andersen or the brothers Grimm. By listening to the book you miss the interesting black and white illustrations by Yuko Shimizu, but the stories have a contemporary edge and are very entertaining.
    • 3/5
      I enjoy reading retellings of familiar stories. This book was a nice, quick read, with some different takes on stories we know well. Side note: This pick was my "blind date with a book" from a nearby library. I love this idea.
    • 5/5
      A well re imagined modern take on the fairy tales of my childhood although I don't think I shall be reading them to my future grandchildren!
      My favourite is Rumpelstiltskin, written from the goblin's point of view.
      The Yuko Shimizu artwork is stunning and really makes the stories come alive for me.
      Great fun!
      I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Harper Collins via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.
    • 5/5
      If you love fairy tales but want a modern twist this is the perfect book! A short quick read but witty, creative and entertaining! Loved it!
    • 2/5
      After being so deeply touched by The Hours this collection was a huge letdown. Read more like a junior high writing assignment. Didn't bother reading the last 25 pages, already took up too much time.
    • 3/5
      Not the usual type of book I read but am willing to try anything written by this author. To my surprise I enjoyed it very much. Taking many of our beloved fairytale and giving them a very inventive modern twist was pure entertainment. Many were extremely amusing, so very clever. But..... while Cunningham's wit and originality were in fine display I missed his ingenious plots and his expansiveness that is more adequately displayed in his novels. Still very entertaining, a quick read that was more than worth my time.
    • 5/5
      Michael Cunningham's clever twists on traditional fairy tales provides not-for-the-kids entertainment in macabre and dark fashion. Although we all know that even the traditional fairy tales were sanitized for children (they are all really rather dark and violent by nature), Cunningham's take on such familiar tales as "Snow White" and "Rapunzel" adds a layer of psychological and emotional complexity that really elevates the stories to an entirely different plane.Having never read anything by Cunningham, I was impressed with his writing. (I have since discovered that he is a Pultizer Prize-winner, which doesn't surprise me, based on the quality and depth of his writing in "A Wild Swan.") Descriptions in each story are beautifully conveyed with just the right bit of humor, irony, sadness, and anger. The stunning illustrations by Yuko Shimizu are a perfect match for Cunningham, easily evoking the exact emotions that Cunningham elicits from his writing.This book was a very fast read, and I enjoyed every story (although my favorite was his take on "Beauty and the Beast"). Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A collection of re-worked fairy tales with flawed though familiar characters and a contemporary spin, but retaining the fairy-tale magic. For instance ...

      "This was not a smart boy we're talking about .... Jack is the boy who says 'Wow, dude, magic beans, really!' "

      The tales are a little wicked, some a little bawdy, but also quite humorous. One's I liked are:

      Crazy Old Lady (Hansel and Gretel)
      Jacked (Jack and the Beanstalk)
      Little Man. (Rumplestiltskin)
      Her Hair (Rapunzul)

      And The Monkey's Paw

      4 stars overall (I'd give some of the tales 5 stars)
    • 4/5
      This a quick short story collection of dark fairy tale retelling for adults by Michael Cunningham the author of the Hours. This, however, is much different from the Hours. These make great stories to read before bedtime.

      Some of the stories I didn't really care for, like the first and last one, but others I liked enough. I think my favorite one was called "Beasts," a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast." I liked "Crazy Old Lady" and "Little Man" as well, which both are told in second person.

      Besides Cunningham's name, Yuko Shimizu's name is another reason I got this book. I love her covers for the comic book Unwritten. I kind of wish some of these illustrations were in color and bigger, but they fit for the setting.

      If you are a fan of dark twisted retelling or Michael Cunningham's style this book is for you. Keep in mind this isn't the Hours. I like that he wrote something completely different.
    • 3/5
      "A Wild Swan: And Other Tales" by Michael Cunningham; Lili Taylor and Billy Hough, narratorsThis brief, clever and creative re-imagining of childhood fairytales for adults is entertaining. I found some interesting, some humorous, some philosophical and some, truthfully, a bit pointless. Still, it was an interesting respite from the hassles of everyday life, and I enjoyed wondering how the tales would be reshaped. Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk and the Monkey’s Paw are just three of the many presented in a different version than we originally read them as children.
    • 5/5
      This review is for the audio version of Michael Cunningham's A Wild Swan. I am a fan of retelling a familiar story from either a different perspective (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) or with a different emphasis, which this collection does with several fairy tales. This collection succeeds primarily because it keeps the basic structure of each tale but delves a bit deeper into the psychology motivating the characters. The originals were primarily written to influence the actions of the reader, to establish or enforce the norms of the time. While that is not lost in these stories, the emphasis is on an almost tongue-in-cheek psychological analysis (and the periodic sociological analysis as well) of the characters.

      The audio version was tremendous! I have to disclose that I am a big fan of Lili Taylor so I started out a bit biased, I'm sure. She delivered as I expected and Billy Hough was also phenomenal. They did a masterful job of highlighting key passages through subtle intonations and pauses.

      I would definitely recommend the audio version to anyone interested in short tales and in nuanced modernizations of classic tales.

      Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.
    • 4/5
      I thought most of the stories were fantastic -- humorous, wry and wise. The illustrations and book design are outstanding and really make this a beautiful book. Bravo for putting together such a nice work of art.

      I did feel, however, that the last two stories weren't up to the mark, and wonder if someone was pressuring Cunningham to pad this slim volume. It's something you used to see with some records, too, once upon a time. I would advise readers to just skip those last two. Make your own mix-tape, as it were.

    Book preview

    A Wild Swan - Michael Cunningham

    DIS. ENCHANT.

    Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you. No one wants to transform you into a beast, or put you to sleep for a hundred years. The wraith disguised as a pixie isn’t thinking of offering you three wishes, with doom hidden in them like a razor in a cake.

    The middling maidens—the ones best seen by candlelight, corseted and rouged—have nothing to worry about. The pudgy, pockmarked heirs apparent, who torment their underlings and need to win at every game, are immune to curse and hex. B-list virgins do not excite the forces of ruination; callow swains don’t infuriate demons and sprites.

    Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings. Vengeful entities seek only to devastate the rarest, the ones who have somehow been granted not only bower and trumpet but comeliness that startles the birds in the trees, coupled with grace, generosity, and charm so effortless as to seem like ordinary human qualities.

    Who wouldn’t want to fuck these people up? Which of us does not understand, in our own less presentable depths, the demons and wizards compelled to persecute human mutations clearly meant, by deities thinking only of their own entertainment, to make almost everyone feel even lonelier and homelier, more awkward, more doubtful and blamed, than we actually are?

    If certain manifestations of perfection can be disgraced, or disfigured, or sent to walk the earth in iron shoes, the rest of us will find ourselves living in a less arduous world; a world of more reasonable expectations; a world in which the appellations beauty and potency can be conferred upon a larger cohort of women and men. A world where praise won’t be accompanied by an implied willingness to overlook a few not-quite qualities, a little bit of less-than.

    Please ask yourself. If you could cast a spell on the ludicrously handsome athlete and the lingerie model he loves, or on the wedded movie stars whose combined DNA is likely to produce children of another species entirely … would you? Does their aura of happiness and prosperity, their infinite promise, irritate you, even a little? Does it occasionally make you angry?

    If not, blessings on you.

    If so, however, there are incantations and ancient songs, there are words to be spoken at midnight, during certain phases of the moon, beside bottomless lakes hidden deep in the woods, or in secret underground chambers, or at any point where three roads meet.

    These curses are surprisingly easy to learn.

    A WILD SWAN

    Logo Missing ere in the city lives a prince whose left arm is like any other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing.

    He and his eleven brothers were turned into swans by their vituperative stepmother, who had no intention of raising the twelve sons of her husband’s former wife (whose pallid, mortified face stared glassily from portrait after portrait; whose unending pregnancies had dispatched her before her fortieth birthday). Twelve brawling, boastful boys; twelve fragile and rapacious egos; twelve adolescences—all presented to the new queen as routine aspects of her job. Do we blame her? Do we, really?

    She turned the boys into swans, and commanded them to fly away.

    Problem solved.

    She spared the thirteenth child, the youngest, because she was a girl, though the stepmother’s fantasies about shared confidences and daylong shopping trips evaporated quickly enough. Why, after all, would a girl be anything but surly and petulant toward the woman who’d turned her brothers into birds? And so—after a certain patient lenience toward sulking silences, after a number of ball gowns purchased but never worn—the queen gave up. The princess lived in the castle like an impoverished relative, fed and housed, tolerated but not loved.

    The twelve swan-princes lived on a rock far out at sea, and were permitted only an annual, daylong return to their kingdom, a visit that was both eagerly anticipated and awkward for the king and his consort. It was hard to exult in a day spent among twelve formerly stalwart and valiant sons who could only, during that single yearly interlude, honk and preen and peck at mites as they flapped around in the castle courtyard. The king did his best at pretending to be glad to see them. The queen was always struck by one of her migraines.

    Years passed. And then … At long last …

    On one of the swan-princes’ yearly furloughs, their little sister broke the spell, having learned from a beggar woman she met while picking berries in the forest that the only known cure for the swan transformation curse was coats made of nettles.

    However. The girl was compelled to knit the coats in secret, because they needed (or so the beggar woman told her) not only to be made of nettles, but of nettles collected from graveyards, after dark. If the princess was caught gathering nettles from among tombstones, past midnight, her stepmother would surely have accused her of witchcraft, and had her burned along with the rest of the garbage. The girl, no fool, knew she couldn’t count on her father, who by then harbored a secret wish (which he acknowledged not even to himself) to be free of all his children.

    Image Missing

    The princess crept nightly into local graveyards to gather nettles, and spent her days weaving them into coats. It was, as it turned out, a blessing that no one in the castle paid much attention to her.

    She had almost finished the twelve coats when the local archbishop (who was not asked why he himself happened to be in a graveyard so late at night) saw her picking nettles, and turned her in. The queen felt confirmed in her suspicions (this being the girl who shared not a single virginal secret, who claimed complete indifference to shoes exquisite enough to be shown in museums). The king, unsurprisingly, acceded, hoping he’d be seen as strong and unsentimental, a true king, a king so devoted to protecting his people from the darker forces that he’d agree to the execution of his own daughter, if it kept his subjects safe, free of curses, unafraid of demonic transformations.

    Just as the princess was about to be tied to the stake, however, the swan-brothers descended from the smoky sky, and their sister threw the coats onto them. Suddenly, with a loud crackling sound, amid a flurry of sparkling wind, twelve studly young men, naked under their nettle coats, stood in the courtyard, with only a few stray white feathers wafting around them.

    Actually …

    … there were eleven fully intact princes and one, the twelfth, restored save for a single detail—his right arm remained a swan’s wing, because his sister, interrupted at her work, had had to leave one coat with a missing sleeve.

    It seemed a small-enough price to pay.

    Eleven of the young men soon married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled everyone, right down to the mice in the walls. Their thwarted stepmother, so raucously outnumbered, so unmotherly, retreated to a convent, which inspired the king to fabricate memories of abiding loyalty to his transfigured sons and helplessness before his harridan of a wife, a version the boys were more than willing to believe.

    End of story. Happily ever after fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.

    Almost everyone.

    It was difficult for the twelfth brother, the swan-winged one. His father, his uncles and aunts, the various lords and ladies, were not pleased by the reminder of their brush with such sinister elements, or their unskeptical willingness to execute the princess as she worked to save her siblings.

    The king’s court made jokes about the swan-winged prince, which his eleven flawlessly formed

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