The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories

The only trade paperback edition of Andersen’s fairy tales that presents them exactly as he collected them in the original Danish edition of 1874, and includes his own notes to his stories. Recognizing the literary merit of Andersen’scolloquial language, which Victorian translators and their imitators often altered to sentimentalize or vulgarize, translator Erik Haugaard has remained faithful to the original text.

Andersen’s tales, such as “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Red Shoes,” and “The Nightingale,” are remarkable for their sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity, and they are like no others written before or since. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and retold folklore, Andersen adopted the most ancient literary forms of the fairy tale and the folktale and distilled them into a genre that was uniquely his own.