The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales by Nicholas Jubber John Murray, 336 pages, £20
ROOM AND BOOK
The title alone of The Ocean of the Streams of Story, a vast 11th-century compendium of fantastical Indian tales, is enough to kindle the imagination. Structured as a recursive loop of fluid and overlapping tales, the experience of reading The Ocean is, according to Nicholas Jubber, not all that dissimilar to the “interconnecting, narrative promiscuity” and “relentless polyphony” of surfing the world wide web. Though the sheer raw imaginative capacity of such collections may be enough to transfix us, The Fairy Tellers reminds us of a truth hidden in plain sight whenever we approach classic tales of the fantastic: that, while these tales are in one sense timeless and their forms may have changed over the years, they still have named human authors.