About the Book: 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.