With their cannibalistic witches lurking in spooky forests, beanstalks leading to real castles in the air, and disagreeable gnomes bent on making treacherous bargains, fairy tales have a coefficient of weirdness so high that they can seem like one-offs, singular inventions rooted in one specific time and place. There’s the classic French “Sleeping Beauty,” the British “Jack the Giant Killer,” and the German “Snow White.” Then along comes the translation of a collection of Chinese fairy tales written down nearly a hundred years ago. And, presto, it becomes clear that Little Red Riding Hood is not a French or a German invention, but a universal child wearing different disguises as she makes her way through a wilderness, always the innocent target of a monster with an outsized appetite for young flesh.
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