Word: tales
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...rate, she's written them now - Scholastic has just published the actual Tales of Beedle the Bard, a volume that includes five stories: the three Ron mentions plus "The Tale of the Three Brothers" (which already appeared in full in Deathly Hallows) and "The Warlock's Hairy Heart." Beedle joins Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and, basically, all the movies as one of the minor but undeniable pleasures of the Potter canon. It's a book of meta-fairy tales - fairy tales for people who already live in a fairy-tale world where dragons...
...with an introduction, an afterword, triple spacing and margins into which you could fit a Hungarian Horntail. None of the stories in it are bad - I don't think J.K. Rowling knows how to be less than charming in print - but they do vary in quality. The first tale, "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot," is the worst, a grimly heartwarming trifle about how you should be nice to Muggles. "Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump," a variant on the emperor's new clothes, isn't much more successful, though it was a relief to me to learn that...
...collection picks up with "The Warlock's Hairy Heart," a gothic, Poe-like tale about a wizard who uses Dark magic to make himself immune to love. He locks his heart away, literally, Horcrux-style, in a crystal case. By the time he finally goes to recover it he finds that his heart "had grown strange during its long exile, blind and savage in the darkness to which it had been condemned, and its appetites had grown powerful and perverse." Also it had gotten hairy. Rowling doesn't tell us the why of the hair, and no plot points turn...
...best of the bunch are "The Fountain of Fair Fortune" and "The Tale of Three Brothers." "Fair Fortune" is about three witches and a knight and their quest to reach a magic fountain. "Three Brothers" is, of course, a compressed little gem about Rowling's great themes, love and death. (Though there's one thing I don't get about the story: are we supposed to believe that the Youngest Brother spends his whole life wearing the invisibility cloak? You'd think he'd at least wash it once in a while, at which time Death would swoop down...
...been impossible to independently verify the police account of Kasab's confession, and that is one of the reasons Pakistan has yet to act on the incendiary implications. The details are key, and they seem to fluctuate depending on who is narrating the tale. Indian media have even given the surviving attacker conflicting last names. Some say it is Iman, not Kasab. "There are many doubts that people will have," says Bhushan Gagrani, a Maharashtra government spokesman. "But I don't see a reason not to believe the police...