Category Archives: Books

Jack Zipes’s Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller

Hans Christian Andersen is quite arguably the best-known writer of fairy tales in the world, or at least that part of the world that derives from European traditions. Jack Zipes argues that he is also the most misunderstood, an argument … Continue reading

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Jack Zipes’s Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives

Chuck Lipsig wrote this review. Jack Zipes is one of the most noted collectors of, and commentators on, fairy tales. In Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Zipes writes about his activities as a storyteller outside the universities, where he … Continue reading

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Jack Zipes’s Utopian Tales From Weimar, and Hermann Hesse’s The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, edited and translated by Jack Zipes

Chuck Lipsig wrote this review. I hesitate to choose any nation to be the nation of fairy tales. However, if I had to make a list, Germany, with its early 19th-century outpouring of tales, most notably by The Brothers Grimm, … Continue reading

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Jack Zipes’s Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry

Chuck Lipsig wrote this review. I am not, I suspect, the intended audience for Jack Zipes’s Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. Zipes is a solidly on the political left, bemoaning the capitalist culture industry, especially … Continue reading

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Dark Horse’s action figures: Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins: The Lost Walt Disney Production

Dark Horse Books, a division of Dark Horse Comics, recently released Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the United States Air Force. In a slightly melodramatic and over-sentimentalized introduction, Leonard Maltin gives a nevertheless fascinating … Continue reading

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Kim Wilson’s Tea with Jane Austen

Books are a lot like meals: sometimes you want something long, drawn-out and filling, other times you want something light and easy, but with enough substance to make it worthwhile. I have to admit that my current diet of epic-length … Continue reading

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Tim Pratt’s Hart & Boot & Other Stories

If there is any justice at all in this universe, Tim Pratt will someday be as wealthy and famous as Neil Gaiman. Why do I say this? Because he’s every bit as good a writer as Neil is now. So … Continue reading

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Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt’s Flytrap #6

Flytrap #6 is the latest issue of this little jewel of a ‘zine published twice a year by Tropism Press. As usual, this issue of Flytrap includes the quirky combination of personal newsletter and literary magazine that gives it so … Continue reading

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Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt’s Flytrap #5

Flytrap is a twice yearly zine from Tropism Press, except when it isn’t because the editors were on their honeymoon (see the pictures of Hawaii which illustrate this issue). Such eclectic elements are part of what makes this zine so … Continue reading

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William Shunn’s An Alternate History of the 21st Century, and Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt’s Flytrap #8

I had rather a shock when I finished William Shunn’s An Alternate History of the 21st Century. Most of the comments and analyses I’d come up with while reading these stories were echoed in the author’s “Afterword.” I’m not quite … Continue reading

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