Six stories and three poems relate the adventures of the fairy folk and their friends, the flowers.

Includes tales of fairies, changelings, ghosts, witches, saints, the devil, giants, kings, queens, and robbers.

A little princess is protected by her silver-haired great-grandmother and by her friend Curdie who knows how to frighten the goblin miners who live beneath the castle.

An ugly ducking spends an unhappy year ostracized by the other animals before he grows into a beautiful swan. Includes a sound cassette

A young girl feels a pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds and proves she is a real princess

Kind Beauty grows to love the Beast at whose castle she is compelled to stay and through her love releases him from the spell which had turned him from a handsome prince into an ugly beast

The four princes erroneously dubbed Prince Charming and rudely marginalized in their respective fairy tales form an unlikely team when a witch threatens the whole kingdom. Includes "Extras" at the end of the book.

"Gregory Maguire returns with an inventive novel inspired by a timeless holiday legend, intertwining the story of the famous Nutcracker with the life of the mysterious toy maker named Drosselmeier who carves him."--Amazon.com.

""A splendid modern work...What baroque dreams, grotesque scenes, ghostly, ridiculous, strange, and chilling brainstorms!... All of this is remarkable, original, and uncanny... I recommend that readers go and find some good time to spend with this beautiful book."--Thomas Mann." ""Flirting with aestheticism and exoticism, Bela Balazs's fairy tales draw their power from an oracular voice that traces paths of desire, dread, rapture, and sorrow, A master...

Minli, an adventurous girl from a poor village, buys a magical goldfish, and then joins a dragon who cannot fly on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon in hopes of bringing life to Fruitless Mountain and freshness to Jade River.