How's that for sound?
Is that good?
Thanks for that lovely introduction, Chris.
It's such a gift to get to work with you as my editor,
not because you understand or say
you understand and appreciate my work, but--
and that it gets to be made into books-- but because we have
so many conversations about books and about the stories
that we love.
And you're constantly recommending reading to me,
and we're talking about books that we love.
And I think that that's the real gift of working with Coffee
House Press and with you.
It's about reading and about readers and authors as readers.
And I just so admire your work as an editor, Katie,
and it's always maddening to read after someone like Ander.
Not really fair, let's put it that way.
But fairy tales are never fair, so it makes sense.
I'm a big fan of Space Invaders though,
so I got to get that Martin Amis book.
I'm a big fan of Money, too--
the book Money, I should say.
So I'm really interested, and I love that project.
It's an honor to read with you, and thank you
all for coming out.
It's really nice to see so many faces--
authors, students, colleagues, so many people here tonight.
It's really nice to be here.
I'm just going to read you two stories.
They're really short.
And I'm going to begin, though, and it
makes sense because of Ander's library project,
to begin with this, in a way.
I'm going to begin with a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm
because I write fairy tales because I
fell in love, of course, with reading them first.
And writing them, I suppose, was a way
to keep reading them even more, over and over again.
And these are just stories that really provided me
with great consolation even though they're not
very happy stories.
Even the Disney versions, if you bother to watch closely,
are pretty gruesome.
But I fell in love with reading through fairy tale books.
So I thought I would start, just to pay homage to the Brothers
Grimm who perfected the art form, though it
exists around the world and has for a thousand--
well, nobody knows how long.
Somebody in class yesterday said these stories have existed
forever, I think, was the term.
And that's probably true in a certain way.
But just to get you in the mood of the tale,
I'm going to read a story called "The Hare's Bride" to you.
And the Brothers Grimm--
one was a poet, one was a scholar.
And they really perfected the grammar of this kind of story,
so.
"There was once a woman and her daughter
who had a beautiful garden with cabbages.
A hare got into it, and during the winter
he ate all the cabbages.
So the mother said to the daughter,
'Go to the garden and chase the hare away.'
The girl said to the hare, 'Shoo, shoo, hare!
You're eating all our cabbages.'
The hare said, 'Come, girl, sit on my tail,
and come with me to my hut.'
The girl would not do that.
The next day, the hare came again and ate cabbages,
so the woman said to her daughter,
'Go to the garden and chase the hare away.'
The girl said to the hare, 'Shoo, shoo, hare!
You're eating all our cabbages.'
The hare said, 'Come, girl, sit on my tail,
and come with me to my hut.'
The girl would not do that.
On the third day, the hare came again and ate cabbages,
so the woman said to her daughter,
'Go to the garden and chase the hare away.'
The girl said, 'Shoo, shoo, hare!
You're eating all our cabbages.'
The hare said, 'Come, girl, sit on my tail,
and come with me to my hut.'
So the girl sat on the hare's tail,
and the hare took her far away to his little hut
and then said, 'Now cook some green cabbage and millet.
I'm going out to invite guests to our wedding.'
Then all the wedding guests arrived.
Who were the wedding guests?
I can tell you because someone else told me.
They were all hares.
And the crow was there as parson to marry
the bride and the bridegroom, and the fox served as sexton,
and their altar was under the rainbow.
But the girl was sad, for she was all alone.
The hare came up to her and said, 'Open the door!
Open the door!
The wedding guests are making merry.'
The bride cried and said nothing.
The hare went away.
Then the hare came back and said, 'Open the door!
Open the door!
The wedding guests are hungry.'
The bride continued to cry and said nothing.
The hare went away.
Then he came back and said, 'Open the door!
Open the door!
The wedding guests are waiting.'
The bride said nothing, and the hare went away.
Then she dressed a straw doll in her clothes,
gave it a stirring spoon, and stood
it next to the millet pot.
Then she went back to her mother.
The hare came once more and said, 'Open the door!
Open the door!'
Then he opened the door himself and struck the doll in the head
so that its cap fell off.
Then the hare saw that this was not his bride,
and he sadly went away."
Happy ending, right?
[LAUGHTER]
In some translations, it's not that the cap gets knocked off,
but the head--
that he knocks the head off of the bride.
And then the hare is sad.
So they're not really princess-gets-married stories,
in a certain way, right?
I mean not at all.
And Elizabeth Evans, a wonderful writer
who's here who's reading later on in our reading series,
assigned this book to me as a student
in a writing workshop-- this story, "The Hare's Bride."
And the illustration that accompanies
the story in a lot of collections of the Grimm's
tales is actually-- even though the story is called "The Hare's
Bride" and the bride is a human girl,
the picture is of a little rabbit with a bridal veil on.
So it's really nonsense from start to finish,
which you find in a lot of old fairy tales.
And I think that's part of why I love them and imitate them.