Even Grimmer Tales (Not for the Faint-Hearted)

by Valerie Volk, Leszek Hermanowicz (Illustrator)

Overview

Adult fairy tales – not for the faint-hearted, indeed!

Valerie Volk has transported and adapted many of the classic Brothers Grimm tales into a modern context, demonstrating that the "real" can sometimes be more bizarre and horrific than the imaginary.

With witty prose pieces to set the scene and Leszek Hermanowicz's clever drawings to enhance the mood, each poem becomes a tour de force, demonstrating how these tales still have relevance today.

The Brothers would certainly approve!

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014646178
Publisher:	IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)
Publication date:	06/28/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Valerie Volk has always been a closet writer, starting as a seven year old with a collection of embarrassingly bad fairy stories. In the intervening decades as a student, teacher, lecturer, examiner, researcher, education program director, wife, mother of four, and grandmother of six, writing has been a secret indulgence.

Now, in this new life as an author, she has published many poems, short stories, and two books: In Due Season, a collection of poems that won the national Omega Writers’ CALEB Poetry award in 2010, and A Promise of Peaches, a verse novel, in 2011. Her third book, Even Grimmer Tales, is a collection of twisted adaptations of the already dark tales of the Brothers Grimm, and her fourth book is nearing completion.

In her lighter moments, she loves reading, film, theatre, travel, classical music, especially opera, jazz and people watching – a never-ending source of interest.

Editorial Reviews

The interpretations of characters, in Volk's witty enactments are not for what used to be called 'the little ones'. Rather, they are specifically addressed to 'a mature reader'. That is, for those who have already (at least, temporarily) plunged into the mordant vale of scepticism. These are very much modern tales, where retribution is, from the start, a two-way process to which many readers will instantly respond.

Bruce Dawe

A sequence of funny, dark and sly monologues, each of which offers
a highly entertaining modern take on a traditional fairy story.
Mother Goose cooked and stuffed with plenty of spice.

Peter Goldsworthy

All this is accomplished in a deft versification that responds to the rhythms and idioms of contemporary colloquial speech, falling for emphasis into rhyme or half-rhyme, building the rhetorics of self-defence and involuntary self-revelation. Knowingly exploiting the dramatic monologue form, Volk up-dates and refreshes it. This poet goes from strength to strength, delighting readers with her inventiveness and her wise, shrewd observation of the human condition.

Jennifer Gribble