Karen Blixen was a storyteller in the traditional, oral sense of the word. Her work skillfully blends supernatural elements, aestheticism, and erotic undertones with an aristocratic worldview. Drawing inspiration from a rich tapestry of sources, including the Bible, the Arabian Nights, Homer, and Icelandic sagas, she crafted narratives that explore the depths of the human experience. Her unique voice and literary artistry continue to captivate readers, offering a timeless perspective on storytelling and life.
Here is a rich new biographical perspective on the brilliant storyteller whose sophisticated romantic fiction...made her an international success and a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature..._these letters+ contain the raw material that was later transformed into her classic memoir Out Of Africa.
Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. 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. 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. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.
In her memoir, Out of Africa, and in short stories, Danish-born writer Dinesen evoked a timeless Africa distilled from her 18 years on a Kenya coffee plantation. This lovely-looking but ultimately shallow picture book, a tie-in with the film based on Out of Africa, splices excerpts from Dinesen's autobiographical writings, stories and letters with color photographs of Africa's land, people and wildlife. For readers familiar with her works, the album is pleasant enough, though readers expecting visual signs of today's real, changing, troubled Africa will be disappointed. In an almost apologetic introduction, Judith Thurman, Dinesen's biographer, notes that the writer was not a conservationist, enjoyed big game hunting and had paternalistic, feudal relationships with Africans. Nevertheless, Dinesen upheld the dignity and value of African culture, and her rhythmic prose captured the complex poetry of Africa's landscape.
Last Tales is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed; "The Caryatids," an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy's spell; and three tales of winter, including "Converse at Night in Copenhagen," a drunken, all-night conversation between a boy-king, a prostitute, and a poor young poet.
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar.Proclaimed a masterpiece on its publication in 1934, this collection is shot through with themes of love and desire - from the maiden lady who now believes herself to have been the grand courtesan of her time, to the Count whose wife is so jealous that she cannot bear him to admire her jewels, and Lincoln Forsner, an Englishman whose search for a woman he met in a brothel leads him into many strange adventures.
Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark.
Karen Blixen went to Kenya in 1914 to run a coffee farm; its failure in 1931 caused her to return to Denmark where she wrote this classic account of her experiences. OUT OF AFRICA is a celebration of her life there; her friendship with the various peoples of the area and her sympathetic response to the landscape and animals are drawn with warmth and unusual clarity. Although the book is pervaded by her sense of loss, Karen Blixen looks back with an unsentimental intelligence to portray a way oflife that is now gone forever.
In 1937, Karen Blixen published 'Out of Africa', her remarkable chronicle of life on an African Farm, from which this account is taken.
Karen Blixen, author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Africa, was also a master of the short story form- her tales offer luminous meditations on rebirth and redemption, on the mystery and unexpectedness of human behaviour. Alongside 'Babette's Feast', this selection also includes 'Sorrow-Acre', often thought to be one of her finest stories.
'As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories.' So said Karen Blixen who, in creating her spellbinding tales of fantasy and romance, also invented for herself the persona of Isak Dinesen. These three tales of love and loss are taken from Winter's Tales.
