With Stranger Magic, Warner has written a nimble but daring work of criticism that draws on her work as a novelist and scholar, combining aspects of literary history, formal analysis, personal essay, and cultural forensics into topics as disparate as the “Smyrna rug” that draped Freud’s couch to the flying turtles that Danish artist Melchior Lorck sketched in the 1550s. It’s a remarkable feat of synthetic knowledge, with particularly rich forays into those whom the Arabian Nights provided both fantastic inspiration and parodic “cover”: from Voltaire, Goethe, who taught himself Persian to compose West-Eastern Divan, and William Beckford to such unexpected veins of influence as Sir Walter Scott. There are historical personages both familiar (Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane) and less so (John Wilkins, Robert Patlock) brought into an encyclopedic sweep of French, German, and British sources. Even given the thoroughness of her investigation into just how deep an impression Orientalist fantasies left on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, she offers an inspired reading of why it was cinema—particularly the phantasmagoric chic-of-Araby “Easterns” of the early silver screen—that offered a germane new life to Aladdin and Ali Baba.
The National Book Critics Circle Award
Sheikh Zayed Book Award
Truman Capote Award
