A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

A collection of Aesop's fables with an emphasis on their ability to entertain rather than moralize.

A ballet originally choreographed in 1890. Good fairies bestow gifts on the infant princess Aurora, but the uninvited evil fairy, Carabosse, arrives and puts a curse on the child - one day she will prick her finger on a spindle and die. The Lilac Fairy then moderates this to a promise that she will merely fall into a deep sleep for 100 years and be awakened by a prince's kiss. At the princess's 16th birthday celebration, a disguised Carabosse gives...

Retells the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare.

The travels and travails of Homer's resourceful hero have thrilled countless generations of listeners and readers, who for almost three millennia have breathlessly followed his voyage home from Troy to Ithaca. Edith Hall explains our enduring fascination with this epic in terms of its extraordinary openness to adaptation and reinterpretation. Not only has the narrative been read to reflect a wide range of intellectual and aesthetic agendas, but it...

Odysseus is far from home, tossed by stormy seas and cursed by an angry one-eyed giant. After twenty years of fighting monsters, angering gods and goddesses, and surviving against the odds, Odysseus returns home and faces more dangerous enemies.