The Complete Fairy Tales

Both of Wilde's books of fairy tales, written for his sons and read since by everyone else. The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888): the statue who gives away his gold leaf, the nightingale who dies for a red rose, the selfish giant and the spring that will not enter his garden. A House of Pomegranates (1891): darker and more ornate — the young king, the fisherman and his soul, the star-child. The Canterville Ghost, Wilde's comic ghost story, is bound in between the two. Ninety-seven plates of ruins, waterfalls and sunken roads, among them paintings by Hubert Robert and Giovanni Paolo Panini, run through the volume like the landscapes of a dream the tales might have been told in.