One Aladdin Two Lamps
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An invitation to change our lives and imagine the world anew through reading stories, in the new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I can change the story because I am the story.
With her execution looming, a woman is fighting for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of One Thousand and One Nights to show how its questions are still relevant to our lives today. Is love the most important thing in the world? What makes us happy?
In her guise as Aladdin, Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know and look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realised through the power of books that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact.
Weaving together fiction, magic and memoir, this remarkable book is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future – an invitation to look more closely at our own stories, and to imagine the world anew.
'Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp' Kamila Shamsie
'One of the most gifted writers working today' New York Times
In her hands, words are fluid, radiant, humming' Evening Standard
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and fiction writer Winterson (Night Side of the River) anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Casting herself as Aladdin, Winterson examines contemporary ills from climate change to doomscrolling—and more timeless concerns from misogyny to religion—in freewheeling essays that invite readers to take a closer look at the fabric of their daily lives. One minute, Winterson is proclaiming that social media's "weapons of mass distraction... shrink the human mind" and declaring phone addiction "a miserable way to live"; the next, she exalts fiction's power to illuminate "inner realities that gradually press forward into our outer circumstance." Faith in story eventually emerges as the book's main concern, with Winterson encouraging readers to apply a literary analyst's lens to the problems of today: "The present is often provisional," she writes. "We don't understand it till it's over." Though the concepts can be dense, Winterson's language is accessible and unfussy, and an irrepressible sense of play animates the project. By the time it's over, readers will feel like they're seeing the world around them through brand new eyes.
