Come One and All to Magers & Quinn

Sunday, January 13,   5pm – 7 pm

Two renowned Minneapolis actors, Maria

Asp and Leif Jurgensen, will display how

truths can be discovered in fairy tales, while

Jack Zipes will speak about how he discovered

the political tales of Edouard Laboulaye and

why they are still so relevant for surviving in

our present perverse world.

Smack-Bam, or The Art of

Governing Men

Political Fairy Tales Édouard

Laboulaye

Translated and edited by Jack Zipes

Wry political fairy tales from a nineteenth-century politician that speak to our current times

Edouard Laboulaye (1811-1883), one of nineteenth-century France’s most prominent politicians and an instrumental figure in establishing the Statue of Liberty, was also a prolific writer of fairy tales. Smack-Barn, or The Art of Governing Men brings together sixteen of Laboulaye’s most artful stories in new translations. Filled with biting social commentary and strong notions of social justice, these rediscovered tales continue to impart lessons today.

Inspired by folktales from such places as Estonia, Germany, Iceland, and Italy, Laboulaye’s deceptively entertaining stories explore the relationships between society and the ruling classes.

In this collection, Jack Zipes, the most important fairy-tale scholar of his gen-eration, revives the considerable work of nineteenth-century French jurist and politician Édouard Laboulaye, whose fairy tales have not been previously anthologized,

much less repub-lished or critically studied This latest discovery is a welcome one, and Zipes’s translations of the tales are extremely well done.”

—Domna C. Stanton, coeditor of Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers

Jack Zipes is the editor of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (both Princeton), as well as The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (Norton). He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.