Books Received

Astrid Lindgren: The Woman behind Pippi Longstocking. By Jens Andersen. Translated by Caroline Waight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

This English translation of Jens Andersen's 2014 biography of Astrid Lindgren delves into the complexity of Lindgren's personal and professional life. Andersen provides a thoroughly researched account of Lindgren's formative years, the unfolding of her writing career, and the development of her campaign for children's rights.

Dread & Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World. By Emily Stamey. Greensboro, NC: Weatherspoon Art Museum (in association with the University Press of Colorado), 2018.

This volume is the accompanying catalog to a major exhibition that premiered in the fall of 2018 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, which is located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The exhibition, which subsequently traveled to Grinnell College and the Akron Art Museum, featured original works by contemporary artists responding to traditional fairy tales. Like the authors of most art catalogs, curator Emily Stamey provides key information about the artworks featured in the exhibit, photographs, and biographies of the artists. However, the volume goes beyond such conventional content, including a thoughtful survey of how visual artists have responded to fairy tales over the past forty years and concluding with an original fairy tale by Kelly Link, "The White Cat's Divorce."

Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited by Andrei Codrescu. Foreword by Jack Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019

Lafcadio Hearn moved from the United States to Japan in 1890, remaining there until his death in 1904. During that time, he developed a fascination with Japanese folklore and often drew upon it in his original short stories. In this collection of twenty-eight stories, Andrei Codrescu brings together a wide variety of Hearn's Japanese-inspired stories, including original fairy tales, ghost stories, and retellings of traditional Japanese folktales. Codrescu also provides a scholarly introduction in which he covers Hearn's life and writing career.

Why Does No One in My Books Look Like Me?: Tobe and Ongoing Questions about Race, Representation, and Identity. Edited by Ashli Quesinberry Stokes. Charlotte, NC: UNC Charlotte Center for the Study of the New South (in association with the University of North Carolina Press), 2018.

The ten essays included in this collection are all written in response to Tobe, a 1939 work of children's nonfiction by author Stella Gentry Sharpe and photographer Charles Farrell. Tobe portrays the daily life of an African American boy and his family living on a farm in rural North Carolina. The contributors to this collection examine the history of this book and discuss the various ways in which it relates to African American history and culture.