Telephone Tales

"In honor of the centenary, this year, of Rodari's birth, a small, enterprising publisher in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion, has brought out the first full English-language edition of Telephone Tales, in a spirited translation by Antony Shugaar. Now, albeit decades late, Anglophone readers can find out why Italians love this writer.It would be hard for anyone, of any age, not to love the illustrationsmostly in Magic Markerthat Enchanted Lion commissioned for Telephone Tales, from the Italian artist Valerio Vidali. The book design itself harbors surprises. Some pages have extra little inner pages glued to them. Others are gatefold pages, where you pull the inner edge and another page folds out. In the drawings, you are shown entire worlds of semi-abstract figures: giant noses, a palace made of ice cream, birds eating cookies, plus, of course, kings and queens and a princess in a tower. The pages are sewn with stitches worthy of a Balenciaga gown. It is astonishing that the book costs only $27.95. Go buy one, right now." -The New Yorker

Autorentext

The Italian Author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari’s works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari’s writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980. 
 Valerio Vidali is an Italian illustrator of children's books. His book Jemmy Button (Templar/Candlewick, 2013), co-authored with Jennifer Uman, was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2013. His book The Forest, co-illustrated with Violeta Lopíz was published by Enchanted Lion in 2018.
Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator, working out of Italian and French. He once interviewed the creator of Topo Gigio. 

Klappentext

Night after night, a father spins a new, wildly fantastical tale from the other end of the telephone. Reminiscent of Scheherazade and "One Thousand and One Nights, " Rodari's "Telephone Tales" is many stories within a story. Full color.

Zusammenfassung
Night after night, a father spins a new, fantastical bedtime story for his daughter from the other end of the telephone.