El príncipe feliz y otros cuentos

"Good novelists," wrote Oscar Wilde, "are much rarer than good sons." Perhaps it would be fair to add that good short story writers are even rarer than good novelists. Before The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote the stories that make up The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and completed them with those in A House of Pomegranates. It is surprising how an author who disregarded morality for the sake of art could write these sentimental, moralistic tales. In other hands, they would have been dangerous material; in his, the sentimental stories become moving, and the moral fables are transformed into lyrical poems of unexpected beauty.