Once Upon a Time There Was Truth, by Jack Zipes (Yale). Zipes, an accomplished scholar of fairy tales, explores the genre’s enduring appeal and its social functions in this erudite essay collection. He acknowledges the long global history of folk stories, but focusses on the Western “literary” fairy tale, charting its emergence out of oral tradition—aided by the printing press, the standardization of vernacular languages, and the rise of modern nation-states—and the process by which it became oriented primarily toward children. Examining both classics (“Hansel and Gretel”) and commercial empires (Disney), Zipes illuminates the fairy tale’s often contradictory tendencies, among them its propagation of conformist values along with its subversive potential, and its power to either “domesticate the imagination” or liberate it.
My World Is Melting, by Line Nagell Ylvisåker, translated from the Norwegian by Kelsey Camacho (Wisconsin). The islands of Svalbard are the world’s northernmost inhabited region; they are also experiencing climate change at an accelerated pace. In this memoir, Ylvisåker, who is from Longyearbyen, a small town in the archipelago which was hit by a deadly avalanche in 2015, documents Svalbard’s transformation. She interviews a trapper who testifies to the changing patterns of the native animals he has interacted with over the past half century, and shows locals struggling with the pressures of a “last-chance tourism” boom. Her portrait of residents pinched between floods and receding sea ice is a testament to their love of this vulnerable land that is their home.
