Word: aesop
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...show was Bil and Cora Baird's 50 animal puppets, who achieved something rare-a fairy tale mixed with true gaiety, a child's world edged by real irony. That was the spirit, too, of Ogden Nash's lyrics, notably in the wolf's lament ("Aesop launched the slander/ I should have eaten Aesop") and his song of thanksgiving...
Though The Short Reign of Pippin IV (a May co-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club) is a fable that makes no claims for itself beyond the desire to please, its author waters Aesop with Alsop, mixes persiflage with prescriptions for the ills of modern France. The satiric lapses into the pontifical ("The French are a moral people-judged, that is, by American country-club standards"). Pippin makes a charming king-for-a-day, but the joke goes on for so long that those who come to laugh may stay to yawn. Hélas, political reality...
...finds the subjects of her stories." So reports Alice B. Toklas, 81, in introducing her translation of this small volume by Anne Bodart, 17. Anne, whose father is a poet and whose mother is a novelist-playwright, is a striking original. As a fabulist, she is slightly fabulous. From Aesop to Thurber and Disney, fable-spinners have produced tales that come to a point. Hers seldom do. Fragile and handled with care, they give off a mood, or shimmer with poetic refraction. Such sense as they make owes less to reason than to reasons of the heart. Anne...
...proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to Kafka to Orwell have found animals just as instructive. The latest to scan human nature in the visage of the beast is French Author Pierre Gascar whose Beasts and Men was published as two separate books in France, one of which (Les Betes) unprecedentedly won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix des Critiques awards in 1953. Very much in the Kafka tradition, Author Gascar has put together in these short stories as mordant and bone-chilling a set of circumstances as modern literature has had to offer since...
...fables, March produced ironic little works in Aesop's ancient literary form. The best of the lot is called Aesop's Last Fable, in which the bemused peasantry, irritated at the fabulist's inability to give a straight answer to a straight question, throw him over a cliff. Here March seems to indicate his sad beliefs as to the function and fate of the writer who says unwelcome things. As for the short stories, many of them concern madness and abnormality, and are set in a shambling Southern town called Reedyville. They have the sincere hysteria...