Grimms' Fairy Tales
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 1812.
Before you read: Some tales are dark: hunger, stepmothers, and danger in the woods. Read them with a grown-up and skip any story that feels too scary.
German household tales the Grimm brothers collected in the nineteenth century, not stories they invented from nothing. You will meet a golden bird, musicians who are really animals, a sleeping princess, and siblings lost in the woods. The plots are short and strange. Kindness is sometimes rewarded and sometimes not. This edition is the public-domain English translation that has been on Project Gutenberg for years. It is a storybook, not a history of how children should be treated.
Public-domain text.