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Generating Hope: Jack Zipes Republishes Anti-Fascist Children’s Book from the Early 20th Century

IN THE DARK DAYS leading up to the 2020 election, Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and one of the world’s foremost experts on fairy tales and books for children, started in his retirement a new publishing house, Little Mole & Honey Bear, that aims to bring back from obscurity out-of-print children’s books that address political issues, such as the rise of fascism. Such books, often published in the 1930s and 1940s, are strikingly resonant with our contemporary political turmoil. But these are not dourly pedagogic books. As Zipes says in the mission statement for his press, these are books that “celebrate the poetic power of fantasy and illustrate how writers and illustrators have used their art to generate hope in their readers.” Read more

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The Forgotten Genius of Leo Perutz

Borges listed him among the great mystery writers of the age; Robert Musil claimed he had invented his own genre; Italo Calvino, Graham Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ian Fleming counted theselves as fans — and yet Leo Perutz has been almost entirely forgotten within the English-speaking world. Read more

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