The Fool and Other Moral Tales
Anne Serre author Mark Hutchinson translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Les Fugitives
Published:1st Jun '21
Should be back in stock very soon
Shortlisted for the 2020 Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from the French.
In 2022, Variety announced that a film adaptation of The Governesses was underway, a co-production between BBC Film, A24 and Element Pictures.
From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales.From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales. 'To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.' 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack - to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer's mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. In 'The Wishing Table', the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.
'I love the way Anne Serre's mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative.' - Adam Mars-Jones
‘I read Anne Serre’s The Fool and Other Moral Tales two years ago, during a hard time. Reading it again, I am startled by the force and splendor of her descriptions of cruelty and compassion in families, friendships, sexual entanglements, art, poetry, tarot, and everything in between.’ — Merve Emre, on Twitter
'With its psychological reality infused with fabulism, Serre's fiction seems to have invented its own genre of literature. The Fool and Other Moral Tales is an impeccable collection.'-Ankita Chakraborty, New York Times; 'From the author of the brilliant novel The Governesses, comes another beguiling piece of art, this time a collection of three novellas exploring desire and morality.'-Three Percent; 'Drawing on fairy tales and psychoanalysis, pornography and poststructuralism, Serre constructs stunning and searing stories. Dreamy and deeply sexual.'- Publishers Weekly; 'Three wild novellas - each of these stories plumbs the depths of desire, morality, and our willingness to go on an unpredictable ride.'- Katie Yee, LitHub; 'Serre's collection speaks bravely, poignantly and perversely to the hazards of alienation - from one's self, from those around you - while also illuminating the blessings and curses, the gifts and sacrifices, of being called to dwell in the gauzy world of stories.' - John Biscello, Riot Material
Praise for The Governesses: 'Genuinely original - and, often, very quietly so. Seriously weird and seriously excellent...call it the anglerfish of literature.'-Parul Sehgal, The New York Times; 'Hypnotic, enchanting.'- Publishers Weekly; 'Serre's language is tight and fabulist, a slim and sensuous fairy tale that reads like something born from an orgy between Charles Perrault, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter.'- Full Stop; 'Anne Serre's style is perfectly controlled. Colorful, by turns elegant and violent, it provokes that enchantment borne out of an unbridled imagination.'-Marie Claire (France)
ISBN: 9781838014155
Dimensions: 185mm x 114mm x 12mm
Weight: unknown
228 pages