Winter's Tales

In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant. Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.

Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baren Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She was divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the <i>nom de plume</i> Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was <b>Seven Gothic Tales</b>. It was followed by <b>Out of Africa</b>, <b>The Angelic Avengers</b> (written under the pseudonym Pierre Andr&#233zel), <b>Winter's Tales</b>, <b>Last Tales</b>, <b>Anecdotes of Destiny</b>, <b>Shadows on the Grass</b> and