Es una recopilación de cuentos populares de diversas partes del mundo, principalmente de fuera de Europa, porque los de aquí ya nos los conocemos de sobra. I could see the roots of Grimm’s Fairytales and Mother Goose in these stories, and there were several stories based around the Cinderella theme, Rumpelstiltskin and elements of Snow White.

Children are roasted in oven and fed into their own unsuspecting fathers by, normally, their stepmothers.

Y quiero mencionar que hay un cuento muy feminista que me ha encantado, en el que un grupo de chicas deciden huir y establecerse todas juntas a raíz del acoso que sufre una de ellas.

There are lengthy introductions, afterwords, and notes explaining why the stories are selected and where they are obtained from. The most interesting ones are those that make some bold, baffling, and just weird aesthetic turn, like having Cinderella conceal her beauty under a head of mangy skins, or when a cursed wife gives birth to a hideous baby riding a goat and waving a wooden spoon. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).I’m… probably going to read that again before the book club meeting to see if I want to discuss anything from that angle. Historias útiles para nosotras en las que somos las protagonistas, a veces virtuosas, a veces malvadas, a veces picaronas, a veces brujas, a veces mujeres-leona, a veces mujeres-mortero.