I highly recommend Brian Attebery's new book. It's a scholarly work, but it reads with bright clarity as takes us back and forth between fantasy and myth, showing not only the connections, but also how the best of fantasy is a roadmap that can return the reader to its source material.
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Brian Attebery is ... Read morethe most readable, the most knowledgeable, and the least quarrelsome of critics. Stories about Stories adds new vistas of understanding to his unsurpassed survey of imaginative literature.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Brian Attebery hits the mother lode in this brilliant archaeology of fantasy and myth. The closest thing to a definitive guide for what C.S. Lewis called 'lies breathed through silver,' Stories about Stories enables us to understand the higher truths of narratives that walk a tightrope between sacred and profane, faith and skepticism, poetry and prose.
Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters
With radiant clarity, Brian Attebery's Stories about Stories examines what happens when we 'imagine our way into the realms of mastery and wonder' by considering the performative and contextualizing nature of narrative. It is a brilliant book by one of the fantastic's most informed, most penetrating, and wisest critics, who understands that the subjectivity of fictive knowledge is the engine behind its energy and fascination.
Peter Straub
Stories about Stories is the best analysis we yet possess of mythopoesis. Attebery's work mediates powerfully between the creative appropriations of myth in modern fantasy, a story known to many, and the less well-known stories of the scholarly rediscovery of myth, and the tenuous survival of oral narrative and myth in living context.
Tom Shippey, the author of The Road to Middle Earth
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