Each week we post a round-up of some of our most exciting national and international PUP book coverage. Reviews, interviews, events, articles — this is the spot for coverage of all things “PUP books” that took place in the last week. Enjoy!

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales

of the Brothers Grimm

These are not the bedtime stories that you remember.

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children’s and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Cinderella” would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style.

For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezsö.

The 156 stories in the Complete First Edition are raw, authentic, and unusual. Familiar tales are spare and subversive: “Rapunzel” ends abruptly when the title character gets pregnant, and in “Little Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel,” the wicked stepmother is actually a biological mother. Unfamiliar tales such as “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” were deleted, rewritten, or hidden in scholarly notes, but are restored to the collection here.

The Guardian interviewed author Jack Zipes for a piece on the Grimms and their tales. Here is a sneak peak of the article:

Wilhelm Grimm, said Zipes, “deleted all tales that might offend a middle-class religious sensitivity”, such as How Some Children Played at Slaughtering. He also “added many Christian expressions and proverbs”, continued Zipes, stylistically embellished the tales, and eliminated fairies from the stories because of their association with French fairy tales. “Remember, this is the period when the French occupied Germany during the Napoleonic wars,” said Zipes. “So, in Briar Rose, better known as Sleeping Beauty, the fairies are changed into wise women. Also, a crab announces to the queen that she will become pregnant, not a frog.”

Check out the full article on the Guardian‘s website.

On the other side of the pond, USA Today takes a look at the book in a piece entitled “These Grimm fairy tales are not for the kiddies,”  and cheezburger.com warns that “your kids may never sleep again.” Take a look for yourself — view Chapter One, The Frog King, or Iron Henry.

Our friends at the Times in South Africa and at NRC Handelsblad in Germany also discuss the book this week. Zipes discusses the book on Monocle radio.

 Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades–all before his suicide at age forty-one. This year, his story comes to a theater near you — The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley is due out before the end of the year. And the inspiration for the script sits on a shelf here in Princeton: Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

This acclaimed biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing’s royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing’s life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing’s revolutionary idea of 1936–the concept of a universal machine–laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design.

The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing’s leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program–all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime.

As it is released in the UK, the Guardian takes a look at the film. Hodges provides comments for the piece:

Andrew Hodges, who published the first substantial biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma, in 1983, suggests that “the production and presentation of the new film [reflects] underlying cultural and political changes” of the last decade and a half – leading to Gordon Brown’s posthumous apology to Turing in 2009, and subsequent royal pardon in 2013.

Hodges said: “Obviously the changes that happened in the UK under the Labour government of 1997-2010, when a robust principle of equality was established in civil society, have made a big difference. Gordon Brown’s 2009 apology was a good example of those changes, and his words seemed to encourage a lot of other people to take the historical question as a serious human rights issue.”

Express reviews The Imitation Game, noting that:

Turing should be a national treasure, honoured for his extraordinary achievement in solving the fiendish mysteries of the greatest encryption device in history. He helped turn the tide against the Nazis. Without Turing the age of the computer might never have come to pass as quickly as it did.

Engineering and Technology magazine interviews Andrew Hodges — check out one of the questions below:

Q: The blue plaque at Alan Turing’s birthplace that you unveiled in 1998 describes Turing as ‘code-breaker and pioneer of computer science’. Are these six words a good crystallisation of the man, or do we need to expand upon them?

A: Turing would have described himself as a mathematician. I think it’s fair to unpack that and describe some of the things he did. The two things he did which are most distinctive are that he founded the whole concept of computer science, upon which everything in computer science theory is now based. And the other thing was his work during the Second World War, which was extremely important cryptanalysis.

Although what he did often seems abstruse, he was unusual in that he was very alive to engineering and the concrete application of difficult ideas. The best example of that is in his code-breaking work. But you can see it in everything he did. Computer science is all about linking logical possibilities with the physical reality. There are lots of paradoxes in Turing’s life, but this is the central theme.

Begin cracking the code by reading Chapter One of Alan Turing: The Enigma.