Product details

• Original Stories: Jack Zipes

• Design: Barrie Tullett

• Illustrations: Jim Hutcheson

• Format: Hardback book.

• Size: 148mm x 210mm

• Publisher: The Caseroom Press

• Publication Date: Spring 2026

Book Description

Tales of Subversion & Hope

For over sixty years, Jack Zipes has been writing about folk and fairy tales – examining, retelling, and reimagining the stories we tell ourselves about power, cruelty, and resistance. God Help Us: Tales of Subversion and Hope gathers together a series of provocative short tales that confront the absurdities, dangers, and tyrannies of our age with incisive satire and an unflinching imagination.

These stories are unsettling, surreal, and deeply political. From despotic presidents who play war games in their bathtubs, to wolves resurrected by the tears of a child, to cloned sheep who escape their laboratories on rollerblades, Zipes takes familiar tropes and twists them into sharp commentaries on greed, authoritarianism, and human folly. Each tale is a reminder that imagination is not an escape but a tool of resistance – a way of seeing the world differently, and of insisting on the possibility of joy and freedom in increasingly desperate times

Beautifully illustrated by James Hutcheson, God Help Us is both a warning and a consolation: a book that invites us to laugh at the powerful, mourn with the powerless, and to cling to hope in the face of catastrophe.

Jack Zipes is one of the world’s leading scholars of fairy tales. His work has consistently challenged the way stories shape culture and politics. Here, freed from footnotes and academic frames, he writes with biting clarity, humour, and compassion.

This is a book for anyone who still believes that stories can change the world.