Popular Tales
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- French majors or intermediate French learners who wish to build vocabulary and language sense through short stories
- Scholars of children's literature and folk tales who need to check the original French texts of Perrault's tales
- Readers interested in the origins of European fairy tales who are willing to read public-domain electronic texts
- Those doing translation practice who can use it as short French-to-Chinese source material
Not a good fit for
- Readers with no French at all, for whom the original text will be very difficult and yield limited benefit
- Parents seeking beautifully illustrated books or picture books for reading with children
- Readers who prefer long, continuous narratives and have little interest in short-story collections
Reading tips
- Start with familiar tales and read them against a Chinese translation to lower difficulty and observe language differences
- After each story, summarize the plot in two or three French sentences to train retelling skills
- Keep a notebook of recurring fairy-tale formulas and sentence patterns for cross-comparison
- Read alongside Grimms' tales on the same themes to observe how different traditions handle them
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
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FAQ
Is this book in French or English?
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About the author
Charles Perrault (1628–1703) was a French writer and poet, a member of the Académie française, and a leading figure of the Moderns in the seventeenth-century Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In 1697 he published Tales of Passed Times (Histoires ou contes du temps passé), which includes such well-known tales as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, and which established the fairy tale as a literary genre. Drawing on oral folk tales, he retold them in clear, concise prose that preserves both the wonder and the moral instruction of the originals while adding a touch of salon elegance. Translated into many languages, these tales spread widely across Europe and deeply influenced later fairy-tale writing.
