Unlike the other great narrative traditions, fairy tales generally have been treated as anthropological phenomena more than as literature. There's no such thing as a definitive text of the major stories; the books read by most children are modern retellings, frequently bowdlerized to protect the sensibilities of the parents. Betts' integral, authoritative translation of Perrault's "Histoires ou Contes," which renders the prose tales in lucid, polished style and (for the first time, Betts writes in his introduction) the poetry in galloping rhyming verse, captures the full measure of the tales' suspenseful power. No matter how many times we've heard the stories, we still long for Cinderella's wicked stepsisters' comeuppance and delight in Puss in Boots' ingenuity in tricking the ogre into transforming himself into a mouse so he can gobble him up.
