For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Madame d’Aulnoy was a literary leader of late 17th century France—ahead of even Charles Perrault in popularizing the literary fairy tale. As Jack Zipes notes in his introduction to this new collection of d’Aulnoy’s tales, The Island of Happiness, Madame d’Aulnoy was the inventor of the term “fairy tales.” She used this form of … Read more
[ad_1] To believe colonialism is a relic of the past is as absurd as believing we live in a post-racial society. This is one of the lessons learned in Andrea Lee’s Red Island House, a novel set in the villages and on the beaches of Madagascar. Reading this book reminded me at times of the … Read more
[ad_1] “For me, ghosts are never the spirits of strangers. They are the people I love most dearly,” confesses the narrator of one of the stories in Elvira Navarro’s collection Rabbit Island. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, these stories often cross the line between delusion and reality, constructs that in Navarro’s hands prove … Read more