In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.
Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.
Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.
Editorial Reviews
"Isak Dinesen's style is elaborately artificial, formal, suave, and beautiful. As delicate as Venetian glass, as ornate with gilt and glitter as a baroque chapel, it chimes like silver bells and rings like crystal. It is marvelous...Perhaps these stories can best be described as the kind Scheherazade would have told the Caliph if, instead of being a citizen of medieval Baghdad, she had been born a Danish aristrocrat with a subtle, wordly, cynical, and speculative mind." --The New York Times
"These tales belong to an old and great tradition and are worthy of it...They are certain to be around for a long time." --Louise Bogan, The Nation
"In her tales, on eof the extraordinary things is that the spell--for they lie in the realm of magic and romance--gets done by the speed of wit, takes its turn within the circle of morality, and keeps its hold through irony...Sometimes one feels that Isak Dinesen's stories come toward one like the flashes and signal-beams froma lighthouse on a strange and infreqently sighted coast--a coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock." --Eudora Welty
About the Author
Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baren Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the nom de plume Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was Seven Gothic Tales. It was followed by Out of Africa, The Angelic Avengers (written under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel), Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass, and Ehrengard. She died in 1962.
