Published by Abaddon, 2018, 368 pages. When I was a child, I loved Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, tales of how animals became what they are: how the leopard got its spots, the camel its hump and the rhinoceros its skin. But it’s a book that doesn’t age well. Kipling, after all, was part of …
Continue reading Not So Stories: edited by David Thomas Moore
Published by Penguin / Vintage, 1931, 362 pages. This collection comes with an introduction by Mark Gatiss, best known for playing Mycroft in the TV series, Sherlock. I discovered that Gatiss and I share a love of Victorian ghost stories: he made a documentary on the life of the greatest of them, M.R. James, a …
Continue reading Ghost Stories: E.F. Benson (selected and introduced by Mark Gatiss)
Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories published by Penguin / Jonathan Cape, 1983, 308 pages. Today is Christmas Eve: the perfect time for pulling our chairs closer to the fire, virtually speaking, and telling stories about ghosts. Ghosts have fascinated me ever since I was a child and was on the lookout for beautiful churels …
Published by University of Hawaii Press, 1994, 93 pages. If this book were to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “‘Development’ comes to a small Pacific island”. Tales of the Tikongs is a collection of vignettes of what happens when foreign development experts try to impose development on a happy-go-lucky people. And …
Translated from Sanskrit by Arshia SattarPublished by Penguin, 1996, 320 pages. The original stories were written between 1063 to 1081. Kathasaritsagara can be translated as the “ocean of the sea of stories”. This is the mother lode of stories, composed by Somadeva around 1070 CE for the Kashmiri queen, Suryavati. But many of these had …
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