Home Books One Aladdin Two Lamps

One Aladdin Two Lamps

One Aladdin Two Lamps

by Jeanette Winterson

Grove Press ·2026 ·240 pages ·Essays
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
49/99
Maybe Someday

40/99

Critics

Near the Top

58/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

27/99

Rating

52/99

Volume

21/99

Rating

94/99

Volume

Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.


About This Book

A woman is filibustering 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 Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions: Whom should we trust? Is love the most important thing? Does honesty matter? What makes us happy? Posing as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to re-examine what we think we know, to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings. As a young working-class woman with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story."


Preview


Reviews

"Winterson's bibliography continues to sprout extensively ..."

Suzi Feay· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"She links class commentary to Nights, with storytelling a prized commodity not confined to elites but open to all, from every walk of life, an embarrassment of riches."

Hamilton Cain· The Washington Post Read review ↗ Near the Top

"It feels thrillingly direct, even when her views are run of the mill ..."

Anthony Cummins· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Winterson, a justly celebrated novelist, critic and memoirist, uses all the genres at her disposal to retell some of Scheherazade's stories, examine them historically and personally, and extract from them lessons about life in the present moment."

Jonathan Russell Clark· The New York Times Read review ↗ Bottom of the Pile

Reader Reviews

0 reviews

Sign in to write a review.

No reader reviews yet. Be the first!