Winter's Tales Author:Isak Dinesen Short stories by Isak Dinesen: — Set in the landscape of Dinesen's native Denmark, the stories create a mythical kingdom. A lord devises a cruel test for a peasant woman who seeks freedom for her imprisoned son. A couple, adrift on an ice floe in the North Sea, plucks ecstacy from death. A man who discovers that he has just spent the night with t... more »he wrong woman talks over his predicament with God. Young men dream of privileged women; the natural and the supernatural alternate; objects mystically embody the riddles of existence.
These haunting stories are as wise as folk tales, yet they are attuned to the ironies of civilization. "Sometimes," wrote Eudora Welty, "they come toward one like the flashes and signal-beams from a lighthouse on a strange and infrequently sighted coast--a coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock."« less