Philip Pullman vient de publier un nouveau livre : Grimm Fairy Tales. 

Ci-dessous je vous mets le résumé et la couv et un extrait d'une interview qui se trouve ici. 

For those in particular who work with children and/or their books is there anything in particular you would want to say to them about these tales, about the Grimms, or about storytelling in general? 
Philip Pullman : The one thing I'd emphasise to the most important people in this situation, namely students who are going to be teachers (most important because it's in the early stages that we form all our habits), is this: Whenever you can, don't read stories like this to children. Get them firmly into your head and tell them, face to face, without a book in your hands. These tales are not literature, which is written, they're something else. I know it's nerve-racking to put the book down and just tell, because the book is a protection in many ways (not least: if the session fails, you can blame the book instead of yourself). But it doesn't really take much memory-effort to learn a story like "The Little Tailor" or "The Three Little Men in the Woods." I don't mean learn all the words by heart -- far from it. I mean get the events in your head so you can relate them easily and confidently. If every young teacher could take the trouble to get two or three dozen stories in their head so they could tell them at a moment's notice -- and they're not very big, they pack down very flat, there's plenty of room for them in your brain -- then they would never be at a loss how to fill that odd ten minutes at the end of a day, or how to calm down a class if they're fractious and over-excited during a day when it's raining and they can't get out to run around, or if they want to start off a new project. And what's more, they last like nothing else. When 30 or 40 years later you meet by chance one of the kids you used to teach, the one thing they'll remember is that story you told that Friday afternoon about Orpheus and Eurydice, or The Goose-Girl, or Hades and Persephone, or Hansel and Gretel. They'll forget Pythoagoras's theorem or the names of the first five American presidents or the principal exports of Brazil, but the story will still be there, and they'll be grateful for it. Nothing is so valuable, so lasting, so deeply loved as stories. Why would anyone not seize at once, with both hands, the immense privilege of telling stories, when it's so easy to achieve? 



Le résumé : 
Two hundred years ago, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of Children’s and Household Tales. Now, at a veritable fairy-tale moment—witness the popular television shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time and this year’s two movie adaptations of “Snow White”—Philip Pullman, one of the most popular authors of our time, makes us fall in love all over again with the immortal tales of the Brothers Grimm. 

From much-loved stories like “Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel” to lesser-known treasures like “Briar-Rose,” “Thousandfurs,” and “The Girl with No Hands,” Pullman retells his fifty favorites, paying homage to the tales that inspired his unique creative vision—and that continue to cast their spell on the Western imagination