All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate.Ī brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, ‘Babette’s Feast’, which was made into the classic film. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe. Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by “one of the finest and most singular artists of our time” (The Atlantic), is a modern classic.

In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.

The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, ‘Echoes from the Hills’, was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. Karen Blixen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Isak Dinesen. They also reveal her as a highly intelligent and sensitive analyst of a strange new world.”-Bruce Allen, Christian Science Monitor contain the raw material that was later transformed into her classic memoir Out of Africa (1937). made her an international success and perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. “Here is a rich new biographical perspective on the brilliant storyteller whose sophisticated romantic fiction. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night’s wandering, he learns love’s true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. In Isak Dinesen’s universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. Out of Africa is her account of her life there, with stories of her respectful relationships with the Masai, Kikuyu, and Somali natives who work on her land the European friends who visit her and the imposing permanence of the wild, high land itself.

Danish countess Karen Blixon, known as Isak Dineson, ran a coffee plantation in Kenya in the years when Africa remained a romantic and formidable continent to most Europeans.

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