The Penguin Book of Mermaids
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
*Includes "The Little Mermaid," now a major motion picture from Disney starring Halle Bailey and directed by Rob Marshall*
Dive into centuries of mermaid lore with these captivating tales from around the world.
A Penguin Classic
Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified "mermaid" specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real.
The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid--at once a human and a fish--illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology, and sexuality.
For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reviewed by Sonya Taaffe, The desires and dangers of the shape-changing sea have rarely been so intelligently and inclusively showcased as in this accessible yet rigorous, passionately diverse, and thoroughly spellbinding anthology of water spirits from around the world., Despite the title, these 63 tales, selected by Bacchilega (Fairy Tales Transformed?) and Brown (Facing the Spears of Change), come from the literary and oral traditions of dozens of cultures, from antiquity to the present day, and do not confine themselves to variations on the seductive fish-tailed woman of European tradition. The dense, enlightening introduction draws out the multivalent ambiguities of this familiar figure and then explicitly decenters it in favor of exploring the wealth of narratives through which humans interact with the waters oceans, lakes, rivers, all manner of liminal shores of our world. , The ancient world is represented by the Naga K liya of the Sanskrit Puranas and the Tahitian eel-king Fa'arava'ai-anu as well as Homeric Greek sirens. Contemporary accounts range from northern Australia to the heel of Italy. No body of water seems without its particular inhabitants: the East Khasi Hills, the Nicobar Islands, the Persian Gulf, and the Lower Amazon are only a few of the sources for these yearning, cautionary, respectful, or humorous tales. Indigenous stories, as of the powerful reptilian mo o of Hawaii, the fish-bringing Pincoy and Pincoya of the Chilean Chilo Archipelago, and the horned serpents and snake-maids found across Native North America, especially shine. The editors also cleverly include Kurahashi Yumiko's "A Mermaid's Tears" and Genevieve Valentine's "Abyssus Abyssum Invocat," two short literary fictions that practice their own provocative shape-shifting on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." , Questions of boundaries, otherness, and interrelation recur throughout, but the editors are careful neither to collapse different kinds of mermaid into flat typologies nor to set them artificially apart. Selkies may be Scottish or Irish. The African diaspora has room for the Caribbean Mami Wata and Yemoja of the Yoruba. The Philippines host both colonial sirenas and indigenous litao., As the editors acknowledge, it is impossible for one volume to represent the totality of the human experience of mermaids and other water spirits, but the limits on this book are ones of word count, not imagination. Many of its most striking selections appear here for the first time in English. The insightful story notes, generous attributions, and tantalizing bibliography are the opposite of gatekeeping. No matter which coast you may call home or perhaps especially if you live landlocked the songs these sirens sing are many-voiced, irresistible, and essential. , Sonya Taaffe's Lambda-nominated collection of queer and sea-themed fiction, Forget the Sleepless Shores, was published by Lethe Press in 2018.
