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One Aladdin Two Lamps
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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."
Reviews
"It's hard to reconcile this with the general thrust of her politics, though the idea that fallen humanity might learn a thing or two from a disembodied redeemer perhaps bears the trace of Winterson's evangelical upbringing, written about elsewhere and revisited here."
"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."
"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."
"One Aladdin Two Lamps is harder to categorize, being a retelling of a few tales from One Thousand and One Nights, interspersed with observations, memories and exhortations ..."
"An ardent defense of storytelling."
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