The Singing Bones

Shaun Tan is a remarkable and versatile artist-storyteller. His tales are usually modern and conveyed in drawings/paintings, but here he turns to the classic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and renders them in small sculptures inspired by Inuit art. These sculptures don’t merely illustrate the stories; they ARE the stories, with each tale summed up in a single, perfect visual image. Each sculpture is shown in a carefully composed photograph, with the sculpture isolated against a dark background. The photographs are all full-page and in color. Facing each photo is a page containing the name of the tale and a striking quotation from Tan’s retelling of it, amounting to no more than about 10 lines of fairly large type. The quotation and the sculpture together encapsulate the heart of the tale. For those who don’t remember the Grimm stories from their own childhoods, an “annotated index” at the end of the book provides a one-paragraph summary of the plot of each story. Rounding out the book is a foreword by Neil Gaiman and an afterword by Tan, the latter describing his inspiration and the materials he used. This book would be a perfect gift for anyone, child or adult, who enjoys fantasy and art and would like to see a fresh take on this familiar but archetypal material.

I accidentally happened upon this gem of a book. It made the perfect gift for my husband who is a ceramic artist. The artwork is uniuque and the quality of the book is exceptional. I only wish Tan had more published work like this. Maybe he will do more in the future?

Shaun Tan's creative genius and skills must have no boundaries, the little statues accompanied with excerpts from Grimm stories, grand idea. These statues or statuettes if you please are packed with meaning and intimacy it almost gives you pain while you observe them. Wish he sold them as well.

Love this book. I am an artist, so I appreciate the work. I don't think it is everybody's taste.

This is not your children's story book. It is a passionate artistic visual exploration of the mythology of our fairy tales. It is beautiful, dark and deep.

Really wonderful stories, some I wished were longer but it's a book of short stories. Amazing art, and dark and original stories!

Wonderful art from a great artist. I have all of Shaun 's books, they are all worth viewing and enjoying.

First of all, the dedication page is absolutely adorable! I really enjoyed the forward by Neil Gaiman; it really helped set up the rest of the book. I also loved this passage: "People need stories. It's one of the things that make us who we are. We crave stories, because they make us more than ourselves, they give us an escape and they give us knowledge. They entertain us and they change us, as they have changed and entertained us for thousands of years." Each of the 75 sculptures included in this book are accompanied by a very brief version of various Grimm Brothers tales. Some of them I understood/remembered, but some I did not. So I really appreciated the annotated index in the back of the book; this made quite a few of the sculptures make much more sense to me! The sculptures themselves were interesting. As with most art, I really liked some of them while I was a bit weirded out by others. I really enjoyed the use of light and shadow as well as foreground and background in each of the photos featuring the sculptures. Everything was so perfectly put together and it really added to the tone of each story.

Este ilustrados es de mi favoritos y me encantó que ahora nos ilustrara de otra manera con figuras de plastilina.

Shaun Tan is a visionary in the world of literature. In works such as Tales from Outer Suburbia , The Arrival , or Lost and Found , he takes readers into places that are all at once, strange, intimate, and disquieting. He amazes again in his latest work. The Singing Bones, are his 75 sculptures along with his selection of texts from the original Grimm fairy tales. He has transformed these fairy tales, formerly rooted in more Euro-English illustration forms – think Arthur Rackham, or Edmund Dulac – into something much more abstract and universal. The sculptures are less representative, and more suggestive. The texts he selected include familiar tales such as “Hansel and Gretel,” and obscure tales such as “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About Fear.” This hardcover edition has beautiful fabric endpapers, a foreward by Neil Gaiman, and introduction by Jack Zipes. The Singing Bones is a gem for any library.

I love this book! I'd put it second only to The Arrival by the same author. Shaun Tan's vision is bizarre, but too inviting to be exactly grotesque. Each little sculpture is faced by a key paragraph from a story, and at the back there's a section summarising each story. This really adds to the book, because some of the stories are much more famous than others. Some of the images are extremely powerful (reflecting the fact that some of the stories are pretty dark), so I wouldn't recommend this for kids, but it is a great gift for any teenager or adult interested in art, fairy tales or the macabre.

und doch auch eine wunderbare Weiterentwicklung seines Werkes. Das Buch ist eine tolle Neuinterpretation von Grimms Märchen. Dazu muss man noch nicht mal unbedingt Englisch lesen können.

Very disappointed, I almost feel ripped off. After the superb storytelling and fantastic artwork of The Lost Thing, or The Arrival, or The Red Tree, or Tales From Outer Suburbia, or Rules of Summer, this book is a bunch of excerpts from Grimm's fairy tales, with photographs of little "illustrative" sculptures which look like they are from a primary school art class. Anybody - even I - could do better interpretative sculptures, though I can't touch the level of creativity in Shaun Tan's illustrated stories. By the way, The Arrival may be one of the best books ever written, because it is written in every language ever devised - there isn't a word in the entire book - but the story is crystal clear. I doubt there is any other book like it.