Fifty More Fables of La Fontaine

No less a poet than the great

        Seamus Heaney said of Norman Shapiro's Fifty Fables of La Fontaine,

        "It is a pleasure to open a book as sure and sly as these translations.

        . . . He gets the tune right and the tone right, and manages to echo both

        the folk wisdom and the poker-faced formality of the originals."

      As surely as La Fontaine followed

        Aesop, Shapiro has now made fabulous fifty more fables of the wonderful

        La Fontaine--among them "The Hare and the Tortoise," "The

        Old Man and the Ass," and "The Frogs Who Asked for a King."

        David Schorr has just as captivatingly illustrated them.