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Title details for A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham - Available

A Wild Swan

And Other Tales

by Michael Cunningham
Lili Taylor
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. 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.
Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. 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.
Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.
Program contains music composed specifically for the audiobook by Billy Hough and his bandmates in GarageDogs. Billy Hough says: "The original piece 'A Wild Swan' was written as a gift to Michael, due to my incredibly strong reaction to hearing these beautiful stories for the first time. I enlisted the brilliant Lili Taylor to alternate the stories with me, and wrote a series of short pieces of music, for their eventual inclusion on this album. I wanted to use the music to illustrate the tension between the ancient and the modern, much in the same way Michael has done in the stories themselves."

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    November 10, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781427262226
      • File size: 84947 KB
      • Duration: 02:56:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      How should fairy tales sound? When it comes to Michael Cunningham's marvelous reimagining of 11 well-known stories, they should sound exactly the way Lili Taylor and Billy Hough deliver them. Their forthright, even cheerful, American tones as they alternate the delivery of each story lull the listener and magnify the inevitable surprise. Over and over, Taylor and Hough offer up the prettiest rose for us to sniff and at just the right moment, let the thorn prick us. Their pacing is immaculate. Cunningham's contemporary reconsiderations of these age-old stories include more wry humor and downright comedy than the originals. "Beauty and the Beast," for instance, becomes "Beasts." Yet they are just as morally profound, occasionally shocking, and enticing as the originals. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 7, 2015
      The latest from Cunningham (The Snow Queen) offers elegant, sardonic retellings of 10 iconic fairy tales, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Rapunzel.” Using present-day details and distinctly adult observations to imagine what happens before, after, and behind the familiar narratives, Cunningham explores the often disastrous transformations wrought by love and need. Having expected “ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form,” the title character in “Crazy Old Lady” is undone by loneliness long before a tattooed pair of siblings (“those young psychopaths, those beaten children”) arrive on her candy doorstep. An unnamed but recognizable Snow White conducts a bedtime negotiation with a partner still erotically fixated on her past; in “Little Man,” a gnome spins straw into gold to win the child he desperately longs for, something “readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.” Though grounded in the inevitable disenchantment of human life—“Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings,” the introduction notes wryly—Cunningham’s tales enlarge rather than reduce the haunting mystery of their originals. Striking black-and-white images from illustrator Shimizu add a fitting visual counterpoint to a collection at once dark and delightful.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 25, 2016
      Taylor and Hough dramatize these newfangled tales with youthful charm and subtle savagery, easily swinging from the author’s gentle humor into darker recesses. Cunningham meshes ancient tales with modern interpretations, offering psychological background for each of our bedtime familiars. He creates post fairy-tale scenarios and seeks answers to questions never asked: Why is Rumpelstiltskin so obsessed with the queen’s baby? What happens to Rumpelstiltskin after she names him? What is life like for the 11 swans revived as men? How does the 12th, the one-armed, one-winged ex-swan, handle his disability? Why is the wicked witch relieved to be shoved in the oven? Cunningham has created a new and wonderful way of bending our minds around the myths that loomed large in our childhoods, and Taylor and Hough do him justice. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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