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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
"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 ..."
"It feels thrillingly direct, even when her views are run of the mill ..."
"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."
"A disquieting book ..."
"Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination ..."
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