ONE ALADDIN TWO LAMPS

Telling tales.

A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination. Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination. “Imagination is key,” Winterson writes. “To see past the present, with its assumptions and constraints. To see round corners.” Stories teach us about what it means to be human, including that being human “can mean appearing in other shapes and other forms.” Stories, as the author discovered in her own life, give us permission to break out of ill-fitting strictures. Growing up lesbian, an only child and adoptee in an ultrareligious evangelical home, she felt that she was “simultaneously hiding a true self and finding a true self.” In the library, she found liberation in fiction that gave her a chance to imagine “what it is like to be someone else” and to inhabit new worlds. “One of the things I love about fiction,” she writes, “is that we can—and do—escape our fate. A word of caution here. This may not mean the characters in the story.” Turning to Shahrazad’s stories, Winterson notes that recurring themes are “harm done to those who are innocent” and “failure to recognise what is valuable, and what is worthless.” What is worthless, according to her, is mind-numbing work and rampant consumerism, for which, she speculates, sentient AI may provide an escape, having no interest in material acquisitions: “The invisible, unfettered, unbounded, non-material life of the imagination, and what it invents, that is the basis of reality.”

An ardent defense of storytelling.