The beloved author of Wicked reimagines Hans Christian Andersen's classic story "The Little Match Girl" for modern readers in this charming, beautifully illustrated gift book
Each year, National Public Radio asks a writer to compose a story with a Christmas theme. In 2008, Gregory Maguire offered a new twist on a classic tale, reinventing the Hans Christian Andersen classic "The Little Match Girl."
When the story was first translated from Danish and published in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the match girl's dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven were often interpreted as metaphors of religious salvation. In Matchless, Maguire adds a different dimension to the story, intertwining the match girl's tale with that of a young boy, Frederik, whose own yearnings are the catalyst for a better future for himself and his family. Maguire uses his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen's original intentions and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the continuity that links the living and the dead.
Gregory Maguire is the author of six novels for adults and more than a dozen novels for children.
His adult novels, all published by HarperCollins, are Wicked (1995), praised by John Updike in The New Yorker as "an amazing novel"; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999); Lost (2001); Mirror Mirror (2003); Son of a Witch (2005); and A Lion Among Men (2008).
Wicked was developed as a big-budget Broadway musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin, The Prince of Egypt, etc.), book by Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life, etc.), and direction by Joe Mantello (Tony Award–winning director for Take Me Out). The original cast recording, released in December 2003, features performances by Kristin Chenoweth, Joel Grey, and Idina Menzel.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was filmed for ABC/Disney and aired originally in the spring of 2002. It starred Stockard Channing and Jonathan Pryce.
Maguire's work for adults and for children has been published abroad in England, Ireland, and Australia, and various works have been purchased for translation into French, German, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
His children's novels include The Hamlet Chronicles, a seven-book series, comprised of Seven Spiders Spinning, Six Haunted Hairdos, Five Alien Elves, Four Stupid Cupids, Three Rotten Eggs, A Couple of April Fools, and One Final Firecracker. Though he is best known as a fantasy writer, Maguire has also written picture books, science fiction, and realistic and historic fiction.
For the Sunday New York Times Book Review Maguire has published signal reviews of significant fantasies by J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, and Maurice Sendak. He has also contributed articles, essays, and fiction in journals such as Ploughshares, Boston Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Horn Book Magazine, and others.
Maguire has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships. He was artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and has received fellowship residencies at Blue Mountain Center, New York; the Hambidge center, Georgia; The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Vermont. In addition to writing, Maguire is a national figure in children's literature education. He was a professor and associate director of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College from 1979 through 1986. Since 1986 he has been codirector and founding board member of Children's Literature New England, Incorporated, a nonprofit that focuses attention on the significance of literature in the lives of children.
Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Tufts University (1990). He has lived abroad in Dublin and London, and now makes his principal home in Massachusetts.
