"Fairy tales, Folktales, Fables!"
Several years ago, I travelled to my childhood home in the Czech Republic and raided my bookshelves in hopes of loading my treasures into a suitcase and bringing them with me to California. It was then that I re-discovered my first love. One by one, I took out my many books of fairy tales and leafed through them, inhaling the scent of pleasant memories, nostalgia, and a bit of dust. Then it hit me. What happened to the genre? Disney has managed to obliterate everything that fairy tales stood for by patching them up into a nice and neat happy ending, and the contemporary authors who claim to love them have fractured them, in the literary sense, either twisting them upside down and inside out or setting them into modern day environments. This sorrowful realization spread through my body and evoked actual physical pain. Three "F" words escaped my lips in a throaty cry: "Fairy tales, Folktales, Fables!" That was the day I set out on a journey of saving them, th