The Selfish Giant and Other Tales

Rediscover the magic of Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales in this beautiful, collectable new Little Puffin Clothbound Classic. 'I have many beautiful flowers; but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.'From the newfound generosity of 'The Selfish Giant' to the haunting bravery of 'The Nightingale and the Rose', this Little Puffin Clothbound Classic collects the most poetic, magical and absolutely unforgettable of Oscar Wilde's short stories for children into a perfectly giftable hardback edition. The Little Puffin Clothbound Classics collect some of the most beloved classic short stories for young readers into stunning, highly collectable small format editions. Bound in high-quality cloth with dazzling new foil-stamped designs, they're little enough to fit in a pocket and lovely enough to keep forever. Gift the best-loved classics to a new generation with Puffin's gorgeously accessible Little Puffin Clothbound Classics collection.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement. Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895. Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.