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.