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Marina Warner's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Marina Warner recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Marina Warner's favorite book recommendations of all time.

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A stunning collection of short stories from Caine-Prize shortlisted and Commonwealth Writer's Prize winner Lesley Nneka Arimah, WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY is a debut with all the imagination of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl and the toughness of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.

'When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters'. The daughters, wives and mothers in Lesley Nneka Arimah's remarkable debut collection find themselves in extraordinary situations: a woman whose mother's ghost appears to...
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Recommended by Marina Warner, and 1 others.

Marina WarnerI really think very, very highly of it…. I’m most interested in where she uses fantasy in order to edge towards apocalypse and dystopia (Source)

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SALMAN RUSHDIE


As well as her eight novels, Angela Carter published four wonderful collections of short stories during her lifetime, and contributed stories to several anthologies. The stories were scattered amongst different publishers, and a couple of the volumes are now out of print. In Burning your Boats they are gathered for the first time; this is a key collection and a major event for Angela Carter aficionados.
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Recommended by Marina Warner, Alan Lee, Alan Lee, and 3 others.

Marina WarnerI absolutely love her last Cinderella –Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost – in which she takes the Grimms’ motif of the mother returning to help her daughter. She combs her hair and says ‘you’ve worn out my nails’ and says to her ‘now you’re strong and ready to go out into the world on your own’. And so she sends her into the world strong and happy. I think that’s a really beautiful story. (Source)

Alan LeeReading Angela Carter for the first time was a revelation to me–I’d never read anything like it. (Source)

Alan LeeReading Angela Carter for the first time was a revelation to me–I’d never read anything like it. (Source)

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3

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

For fans of fairy tales and the literary supernatural: a unique collection of Russian short stories from the last 200 years In these folk tales, young women go on long and perilous quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese, and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Some of the stories here were collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four of the greatest writers in Russian literature:... more
Recommended by Marina Warner, and 1 others.

Marina WarnerOh, the Chandler volume is simply wonderful. The Russian tradition is very interesting because it does seem to be sui generis in some respects…. The Russians have the most single stories of any of the cultures studied. That’s partly to do, probably, with the isolation of certain districts (Source)

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4

Italian Folktales

Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a fascinating and rich addition to folk literature. less
Recommended by Marina Warner, and 1 others.

Marina WarnerThe literature of working people, the people who the communists wanted to include in culture rather than separate from it, was steeped in the exuberant fairy tale, and Calvino wanted to see that culture recognised. When he looked around he couldn’t see a book that did that and so he decided to do it himself. (Source)

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5

The Arabian Nights

Tales of 1001 Nights, Volume 1

'The bride then came surrounded by her slave girls like the moon among stars or a matchless pearl set among others on a string.'

When the beautiful Shahrazad gives herself to the bloody-handed King Shahriyar, she is not expected to survive beyond dawn. But using her wit and guile, she begins a sequence of stories that will last 1001 nights: stories of 'ifrits and money-changers, prices and slave girls, fishermen and queens, and magical gardens of paradise. This volume also includes the well-known tale of 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'.

Along with this landmark...
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Marina WarnerThe Arabian Nights was a collection of popular, vernacular tales that was actually rather despised by scholars – the Arabic apparently is quite rough, compared to the elegance of the Farsi used in the much better known, more established and highly valued Persian romances of the time. The Nights tales were considered trifles and not looked after – the same has happened with a lot of early... (Source)

Robert IrwinWhat’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch. There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re... (Source)

Robert IrwinWhat’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch. There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re... (Source)

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