…rs befriended, loved and inspired. Thanks to their influence, dialect-rich folktales and life histories that would otherwise have perished found their way into Irish literary history. “The portraits in this book are classic Kanigel: lively, sympathetic and thoroughly engaging. Yet what makes the narrative so affecting is the loss that permeates the text. As cultures like those on Great Blasket continue to be destroyed by the march of progress, so…
Read more ›…nown as a nixie, neck, nikker, nøkk, and so on. It’s one of many Norwegian folktales I use in the novel. I love those old ghost stories, where spirits appear incognito and cause all sorts of trouble. My family on my mother’s side emigrated to the U.S. from Norway, and so these old stories just have a special place in my heart. But sometime during the writing process I began to realize that the story of the Nix would be a useful organizing metaphor…
Read more ›…but always lucidly argued ruminations on the nature of story. He explores folktales and why they endure and matter, parallels and differences between literary and visual arts, and, a central theme in His Dark Materials, the profound conflicts between the reductive, authoritarian Christian ‘Kingdom’ and the freer, more ideologically spacious ‘Republic of Heaven.’ Amid animated tributes to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Me…
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