Ball, Jesse. Parables & Lies. Lincoln: The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2008

While fairy tales aren't exactly fables they still instruct, even if the lesson one learns at the end is Don't Trust That Old Woman. Or: While Your Father May Have Remarried You Certainly Shouldn't Love This New Mother The Way You Loved Your Birth Mother And If You Want To Know Why Just Give Her One Month And One Glimpse At The Household's Coffers And You'll See What I Mean. The best Grimm's tales are the ones that end with this kind of resolution, this "Trust me, I know what I'm talking about" voice.

Here's the end of "Cat and Mouse in Partnership", which begins "A certain car had made the acquaintance of a mouse.":

[S]carcely had [the mouse] spoken before for the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world.

Also great are the endings in which something idiomatic has been lost in translation. From "The Bremen Town Musicians" (Die Bremen Stadtmusikanten):

After this the robbers never again dared enter the house; but it suited the four musicians of Bremen so well that they did not care to leave it any more. And the mouth of him who last told this story is still warm.

Jesse Ball is familiar enough with Grimm and these kind of things pop up all over the place in Parables & Lies and that's why I loved it. Most of the stuff in the collection that sounds like it's a parable ends up teaching us nothing at all, ends up sometimes being anti-helpful, if that's possible. One of the stories is about a man who needs to build a house for his family, and it gives us some good folk-wisdom instruction: "He was a poor man, and his family was poorer still, for money is lost in every passing of hands, not least from the wages of a dutiful husband." This man's problem is whether to build his house with one door or two, and right at the moment that we think we'll get the kind of solution that will help us in our own lives, something dangerous hijacks the story:

[D]ay and night, the sun must be allowed to pass. Not just through all the broad and empty places, but through this town of man, and through that town of man, through anger and misfortune, through pettiness and filth. And every sun will be a deeper, a crueler sun. And every sun will know far better the shape, the broad dull shape, of the wound it makes on your face and arms, the wound it presses, deep through the windows of your eyes, where such things will be remembered, but can never be made good.

This is a book of constant danger-ridden hijacking, which is great for a book with so many road stories, so many travelers passing through the pages. You should buy a copy.