Author(s): Anne Serre

Short Stories | France | Translated fiction | Les Fugitives

‘To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.’ From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales, in which kernels of trauma, loss, loneliness and obsession are glimpsed through the glittering gauze of fiction.

The Fool may have stepped out of a tarot pack – to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer’s mind. The Narrator proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. The power of narrative to trump a stark reality is perhaps at its strongest in the last story; in The Wishing Table the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual, and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.

‘I love the way Anne Serre’s mind works, and her slyly seductive approach to narrative.’ — Adam Mars-Jones

‘I read Anne Serre’s The Fool and Other Moral Tales two years ago, during a hard time. Reading it again, I am startled by the force and splendor of her descriptions of cruelty and compassion in families, friendships, sexual entanglements, art, poetry, tarot, and everything in between.’ — Merve Emre, on Twitter

‘The three unique stories in The Fool and Other Tales have a folk tale sense of the familiar and the perverse. They invite us into something playful, but it is the reader who gets toyed with... While described as moral tales, these stories do not give straightforward choices about good and evil. Instead we must scale their ambiguities and allusions with only the slightest of finger holds.’ — Rónán Hession

‘Serre, one of France’s finest fabulists, returns in full force in this strange, beguiling collection about the perils of desire in all its forms.’ —Kirkus Reviews

‘Anne Serre is a remarkable and unusual writer; her pen a scalpel dissecting the human condition with painful precision. The Fool & Other Moral Tales – three novellas – are lyrical and disturbing, wonderful and terrible, arousing and devastating. Their hallucinatory, and at times nightmarish quality, is beautifully rendered by translator Mark Hutchinson.’ — Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast

‘If the first two stories are moral firecrackers, ‘The Wishing Table ’, the third and final piece in the collection, is a hand grenade.’ — Tristan Foster, Music & Literature