Anne Serre

Translated by Mark Hutchinson

First published 1 June 2021

‘To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.’ From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales, in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the glittering gauze of fiction.

The Fool may have stepped out of a tarot pack – to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer’s mind. The Narrator proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story; in The Wishing Table the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.

‘I love the way Anne Serre’s mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative.’ — Adam Mars-Jones

‘I read Anne Serre’s The Fool and Other Moral Tales two years ago, during a hard time. Reading it again, I am startled by the force and splendor of her descriptions of cruelty and compassion in families, friendships, sexual entanglements, art, poetry, tarot, and everything in between.’ — Merve Emre, on Twitter

By the same author: The Governesses (2019).

228 pages
paperback, 185 x 114 mm
isbn 978-1-8380141-5-5

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