May 2012
28 posts
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"Waugh Among the Modernists: Allusion and Theme in... →
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"Waugh's 'A Handful of Dust': Right Things in... →
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"Was Anyone Hurt? The Ends of Satire in 'A Handful... →
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“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding...”
– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
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“Here, the book makes a case for itself and its unusual structure that is utterly...”
– Aimee Bender, NYT 10/28/2011.
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Watch
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Gregory Frost: Fitcher's Brides →
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“Perrault’s story, by underscoring the heroine’s kinship with certain...”
– Maria Tartar, The Classic Fairy Tales.
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Variants
“The French fairy tale of Charles Perrault, “La Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”), was penned in 1695 and published in 1697. The figure Perrault named, however, had dominated international folklore and myth for centuries before Perrault gave him the particulars of a blue beard and a sumptuous castle with one forbidden room with which to tempt and test his wives. Whether for...
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"Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold"
Tho as she backward cast her busie eye,
To search each secret of that goodly sted,
Ouer the dore this written she did spye
Be bold: she oft and oft it ouer-red,
Yet could not find what sense it figured:
But what so were therein ot writ or ment,
She was in no whit thereby discouraged
From prosecuting her first intent,
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went.
****
And as she...
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“At its centre, Oyeyemi’s writing contains a kernel of truth and wit. Mr...”
– Lucy Daniel, writing in The Telegraph, 22 June 2011.
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“The brave Mary (“Be bold, be bold; but not too bold,” the fairytale...”
– Anita Sethi, writing in The Observer, Saturday 12 May 2012.
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“I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading - a lot.”
– Helen Oyeyemi, quoted here.
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“What can I tell you about the behaviour of cities? I’m greedy about cities...”
– Helen Oyeyemi, “Once Upon A Life,”The Observer, Saturday 25 June 2011.
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Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English... →
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"A locked room containing not the bloody cadavers...
“Where Angela Carter exposed the hidden logic of fairy tale, Oyeyemi delights in turning that logic on its head, as with the sinister school described in “The Training at Madame de Silentio’s”, which turns “delinquent ruffians” into “world-class husbands” through a curriculum that includes “Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics,...
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A talking fox is probably up to something sinister →
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'Hairy Fairies'
“Once she’d chosen to dispense with most of the apparatus of what she called ‘real novels’ of the sort in which ‘people drink tea and commit adultery,’ narrative was what remained: the beating, often bloody heart of her argument. It was the simplest of strategies, a return to the storytelling of childhood and to oral traditions that began ‘before there was such a thing even as writing’, but...
Fitcher's Bird →
April 2012
22 posts
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“Women’s dreams are fabulous, and so are women’s thoughts.”
– “The History of Mr. Greenwood.” Peter Buchan, Ancient Scottish Tales: An Unpublished Collection Made by Peter Buchan, with an introduction by John A. Fairley (Peterhead: Reprinted from the Transactions of the Buchan Field Club, 1908), pp. 21-24.
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The Story of Mr. Fox →
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“Mr. Fox began when I was in Paris—it was springtime, so romance was on my mind, and I was also reading Rebecca, which is very romantic, in a psychopathic sort of way. It was the first time I’d read that book, and it opened up the Bluebeard narrative for me. Bluebeard used to be one of my least favourite fairytales—never been much of a one for blatantly didactic stories, wasn’t...
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Why Readers Disagree →
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Helen Simpson: "Femme Fatale." The Guardian, 23... →
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“My intention was not to do “versions” or, as the American edition of...”
– Angela Carter, via.
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“Angela Carter’s life – the background of social mobility, the teenage...”
– Lorna Sage, “Death of the Author”, Granta, No. 41, Autumn 1992, p. 236.
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Sage, Lorna. "Angela Carter: The Fairy Tale."...
This essay describes the cerebral pleasure and liberation Angela Carter found in the fairy tale, and its transformational effect on her oeuvre, by drawing a comparison (as she did) with the form’s significance for Italo Calvino. Carter’s Bloody Chamber tales were written while she was re-reading Sade, and they are read here in that light, as a cruelly self-conscious anatomy of the spell cast on...
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Angela Carter, interviewed by the BBC, 25 June... →
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Constance Markey: "Italo Calvino: A Journey... →
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Kristi Siegel: "Italo Calvino's 'Cosmicomics:'... →
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Oulipo: "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle"... →
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“And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career?...”
– Ursula K Le Guin, “Into the Cosmos with Qfwq.” The Guardian, Friday 12 June 2009.
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The Paris Review: Italo Calvino, The Art of... →
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