In the past week, three different people have asked us the same question, and that’s always a cue to us that it’s time to write a post on the subject.

This time, the question was:

“What are some really great fairy tale collections? I want to read more fairy tales, but I don’t know where to start? What’s really good and what should I read first?”

As always, we have been extra. Instead of recommending 1 book or even 3 books, we have put together a list of 8 collections that we adore and highly, highly recommend. 

Whether you want classics, variety, or to learn more about a specific corner of fairy-tale studies, we got you.

Read on to pick where you’ll start!

The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) edited by Maria Tatar

When people ask us where to begin with fairy-tale studies, we almost always start with this book. It’s an anthology of fairy tales and scholarly writings, with introductions to each section written by Maria Tatar. (Maria is the queen of scholarly and approachable fairy-tale anthologies, so you’ll be seeing her name A LOT on this list.) The fairy tales are grouped together by theme or author. For example, the Cinderella section contains 10 different versions of the story from all over the world (China, France, Egypt, etc.), while the Oscar Wilde section provides three of his beautiful literary fairy tales. Crucially, its super-absorbency also once saved Sara’s computer when her humidifier betrayed her and leaked all over the table, preventing Sara from having a mental breakdown but necessitating a second purchase of the book. 100/10 stars. 

The Great Fairy-Tale Tradition edited by Jack Zipes

The other titan of fairy-tale scholarship in the US is the wonderful Jack Zipes. All his work is fantastic, but we’d recommend starting with The Great Fairy-Tale Tradition for sheer variety. The collection includes 116 tales, organized thematically, plus several critical essays, and the book is over 1000 pages, so it will keep you busy for a minute.

The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights edited by Paulo Lemos Horta and translated by Yasmine Seale

This is genuinely one of the coolest, most beautiful books we have ever beheld. It’s thoughtfully designed, illustrated to within an inch of its life, and put together by literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and brilliant translator and poet Yasmine Seale. This collection includes foundational stories in the Arabian Nights as well as those that were added much later like “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” If you’ve ever wanted to read these stories or to learn more about them, this is truly the best way to do it short of a college course. (Also, several years ago, we did a readalong of this specific collection on our Patreon, which you can still read and comment on if you join at any paying level!)

Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives edited by Jennifer Schaker and Christine Jones

Instead of organizing the stories thematically, Schaker and Jones organized Marvelous Transformations chronologically, from oldest tales to newest revisions, and the result is really cool, both historical and intertextual. Brittany actually reviewed this one for the Journal of Folklore Research when it first came out, and she said: “Jones’s and Schacker’s Marvelous Transformations is not simply another fairytale collection but a true contribution to scholarship and a powerful statement on the future of fairytale studies. In weaving together tales from around the world and scholarship from a variety of disciplines, the editors make a strong case for a fresh look at the fairy-tale form. While I highly recommend this book overall, I especially recommend it for use in classrooms: it demonstrates the diversity, beauty, and endurance of fairy tales and should be a delightful surprise to undergraduates who come in thinking fairy tales are all the sugarcoated Disney stories they remember from when they were small. I am certain that I too will refer back to this text again and again.”

The Annotated African American Folktales edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar

So much Black American folklore has been suppressed, ignored, or forgotten, but there’s still a wealth of information out there (and new folklore being created all the time!) This absolutely gorgeous book is a tour-de-force on the topic. Maria Tatar and Henry Louis Gates co-edited this one together. Gates writes: “Not only did the captured Africans bring their languages, their music, their gods, and many other salient features of their cultures along with them, they quickly learned to communicate with each other across language barriers not only on their own plantations and other sites of enslavement but across longer distances as well. And the telling and retelling of folktales from Africa, as well as those retold and, in the process, creatively reinvented from African and European sources, along with those invented on the spot, were crucial components of identity formation and psychic survival under the harshest of circumstances, key aspects in the shaping of an ‘African American’ culture, a culture built on both African and European old-world foundations, yet one original and new.” 

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen edited by Maria Tatar

Yes, another Maria Tatar anthology. She is PROLIFIC and always excellent. We especially love this one because Maria shares our love/hate relationship with Andersen, which she explains in the introduction. Like the other annotated collection that we’ve mentioned, this book is absolutely visually stunning, and it’s a delightful exploration of all the contradictions and tensions that characterize Andersen’s beautiful and dramatic fairy tales.

Perspectives on the Jack Tales and Other North American Marchen edited by Carl Lindahl

If you ever wanted to go further than “Jack and the Beanstalk,” this collection of Jack tales from Carl Lindahl is exactly what you’ve been looking for. Our favorite story in the collection is  “Jack and the Green Man,” which has strong “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” energy, but there are tons of really wonderful (and pretty obscure) Jack tales to enjoy.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Yes, we have mentioned this book approximately 1000 times, and we will mention it at least 1000 times again. The Bloody Chamber is a collection of literary fairy tales, written by Angela Carter, and published in 1979, and its impact on the world of fairy tales cannot be overstated. Carter’s stories are weird, decadent, dramatic, and Gothic as hell. It’s also by far the most petite of the collections we’ve mentioned, so if you want a quick win, start with this one.

Ok, so which are you going to read first? Let us know, seriously, we’re curious!

P.S. Psst. Did you see that we’re doing a free talk next week? It’s called Whispers + Warnings: The Secret Trip into Faerie They Don’t Want You To Know About, and if you love fairylore, you should absolutely sign up here. And YES it will be recorded if you can’t make it live!