A WILD SWAN AND OTHER TALES: THE ADVANCE PROMOTIONAL COPY

New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. First Edition. First Printing.. Softcover. As New/No Dust Jacket, As Issued.. New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Softcover. As New/None, As Issued. First Edition/First Printing. 12 pages. Preview of the author's collection of modern fairy tales. Now considered a contemporary classic. Advance Promotional Excerpt/Chapbook. Limited Edition, as stated. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published (in May 2015) to announce the release of "A Wild Swan And Other Tales" (in November 2015), seven months later. None of the copies was sold to the public. There is no ISBN. The Chapbook is now rare. Presents, in an elegant chapbook format, Michael Cunningham's "The Wild Swan". A taste of the full-fledged collection to come. It is a self-contained piece, published in its entirety, about a beautiful young man with one human arm and one swan's wing. "The people and the talismans of lands far, far away, the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: The years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half-cured of a curse. Reimagined by one of the greatest storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true" (Publisher's blurb). "We want escapism, of course, but there's another, more complicated, kind of escapism that we also want - an escape into a different, possibly larger, more immediately meaningful world. Fairy tales, movies, novels, they all take us out of the confines of ourselves, of our lives, even if we're perfectly happy with our lives. Because there are other lives too" (Michael Cunningham). An absolute "must-have" collectible, not just memorabilia, item for Michael Cunningham and Yuko Shimizu collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by both Michael Cunningham and Yuko Shimizu. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such double-signed copy of the Advance Promotional Excerpt/Chapbook available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. "A Home At The End of The World" was selected as one of "The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950" by The Modern Library, the most prestigious list of its kind for the period 1950-1999. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and The Pen/Faulkner Award in 1999 for "The Hours". One of the finest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM TITLES IN OUR CATALOG).