La Fontaine Selected Fables – translated by James Michie

Jean de La Fontaine used traditional material for his celebrated fables, but he bought to them his own unique verbal music, subtly intermingling the grave and the gay and rooting hs tales of speaking animals firmly in the worlds of men as he knew them and in the eternal verities of kindness and cruelty, sorrow and happiness, love and death.

James Michie has translated his own selection of the fables and they are illustrated with the 19th-century engravings of J.J. Grandville.