Fabulous, Lucy HughesHallett
Fabulous, Lucy HughesHallett
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Fabulous
Stories

Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Narrator: Lucy Hughes-Hallett, John Hopkins

Unabridged: 5 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/14/2020

Synopsis

From the author of the “sophisticated and erudite” Peculiar Ground (Boston Globe), comes a collection of classic, witty fables, elegantly updated for our modern times.It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable.
Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.They’re ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore.The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

About Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her novel Peculiar Ground was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her other books include Fabulous, a collection of short stories, and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen.She is a widely respected critic and was chair of the judges of the 2021 International Booker Prize.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Madison

There are nuggets of goodness in Fabulous, a collection of retellings of Bible stories, fairytales, and Graeco-Roman myths. However, each story lacked a kind of weightiness I found myself craving. Hughes-Hallett was ambitious in how she set out to lace folklore with contemporary spunk and modern amb......more

Goodreads review by Luke

It was like this lady wanted to write for Once Upon A Time, they turned her down so she tried to make her work fit for Black Mirror, who turned her down also, so then she decided to cobble it together in a book that was so obtuse and superfluous it barely made sense. There were two character twists t......more

Goodreads review by 8stitches 9lives

Fabulous is an awe-inspiring collection of short stories — refreshing retellings of age-old tales from Greek and Celtic mythology to those from the Bible. It masterfully updates them to fit in with our contemporary world and does so in such an engaging and eminently readable manner. Of course, it su......more

Goodreads review by Lara

Never judging a book by its cover is a classic idiom and this is a compilation of retellings of classical fables and (slightly incongruously, two religious stories). Not that you would be able to tell from the book's woozy, psychedelic cover art. Retellings are almost as old as the fables themselves......more

Goodreads review by Madeleine (Top Shelf Text)

[Thank you to Harper Books for my free review copy!] I love short story collections, and I thought that this one would be an absolute hit for me because each story is a fractured version of original myths from Roman/Greek tradition or the Bible. It turns out that almost every single story in the coll......more

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