When I was 5 years old, I remember asking my mother, since dreams can feel so real, how do I know I’m not dreaming right now? All my life I’ve been exploring—in myself and with others—the meaning of dreams, not only nighttime dreams but also real experience, especially in nature, that mirrors our inner process. The fairy tale novels I write are dream versions of our world. Sometimes dreams, like fiction, tell a truth even truer than reality! I have a Master's in Transpersonal Psychology. I started a dream-sharing circle in my community which has facilitated such deep growth and connection, I encourage you to start one too!
I wrote
After Ever After: The Ritual of Forgetting (Book One of the After Ever After Trilogy)
Dreams are for revealing what’s buried so that we can reclaim it and be healed. Half romantic dream, half subtle nightmare, this haunting tale chases buried love and identity, buried memories of children that may or may not be real, and the buried secrets and collective trauma of a civilization itself, which never come to any harsh-lit, practical conclusion but end with as much aching ambiguity as a dream itself. Thinking of this book years later, I still remember a journey of endless mist and yearning through mythic Britain, called forth by the unbroken thread of ancient, marital tenderness in the strange elder couple who are its heroes.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*
The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.
The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.
I wish we had more dream novels out there about animal brides and bridegrooms! Instinctual and unbound by law, with access to wild places we could never reach, animals are such a perfect way to express the id-consciousness, the dream versions of ourselves. Based on a Japanese folktale, here’s a sweet, whimsical story of a fox who turns herself human to love a human man. Which form is real, and which is the dream, and how will she free herself to live both realities as a fully formed woman of her own?
Based on the award - winning short story Fox Magic, Kij Johnson's THE FOX WOMAN is a haunting novel of love and magic, of Kitsune, the young fox kit who catches a glimpse of a Japanese nobleman and resolves to snare his heart. Kitsune embarks on a journey that will change her, her family, and all the humans she encounters...and the magic she conjures will transform all of their lives forever. Set against the backdrop of medieval Japanese society, THE FOX WOMAN is both a retelling of the classic Japanese animal fable and a stunning exploration of what it means…
Genius and multi-layered, impossible to pin down, this warm yet haunting, witty yet aching, honest yet fantastical novel begins with a surreal and strangely relatable marriage in an Escher-like house that moves and lives and then extends in every direction back and forth across the veil between worlds. You will actually step foot into Fairy-land, and be drawn into that fabled dance that is neither exactly maleficent nor in any way kind, but always seductive, always precariously beautiful. Somehow Crowley’s breathtakingly unique, lyrical, and yet unpretentious story-telling wraps romance, fairy tale, mytho-philosophical questioning about space and time, and allegorical critique of modernization all into one very deep and unpredictable story—but without ever losing touch with characters whose simple human longings are just heartbreaking and real.
Edgewood is many houses, all put inside each other, or across each other. It's filled with and surrounded by mystery and enchantment: the further in you go, the bigger it gets.
Smoky Barnable, who has fallen in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, comes to Edgewood, her family home, where he finds himself drawn into a world of magical strangeness.
Crowley's work has a special alchemy - mixing the world we know with an imagined world which seems more true and real. Winner of the WORLD FANTASY AWARD, LITTLE, BIG is eloquent, sensual, funny and unforgettable, a true Fantasy Masterwork.
In both Clarke’s exhilarating novels, you actually feel that you’ve crossed over a line into the amoral wilderness of another world, both beautiful and ominously eerie, and might not come back again. Piranesi’s story begins inside what feels like someone’s dream, a literally endless house filled with an ocean that he refers to as the World. There is only one other person in it besides himself—or is there? Why doesn’t he believe trees exist, yet somehow he knows what they are? As you begin to discover, with goosebumps, what’s really going on, you realize it’s not only his dream but everybody’s dream, filled with all the beauty the real world has lost. And you have to ask yourself, might it be better never to wake up?
Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A SUNDAY TIMES & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' NEW YORK MAGAZINE __________________________________ Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.
In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend,…
This nonfiction classic reminds us that every fairy tale is a collective dream, and by exploring, retelling, and sharing its wisdom, we develop our calling as individuals and societies. Other great Jungian authors have done similar interpretations of fairy tales like dreams of how to live. But I love this one for its deep dive into feminine archetypes—because the wisdom of the feminine is what leads us to that watery, creative, inner world where dreams are made, a world sorely neglected in our achievement-focused world. Written with the haunting cadence of a fairy tale itself, this book is so much more than analysis—it is a wolf’s howl directly to the soul.
First published three years before the print edition of Women Who Run With the Wolves made publishing history, this original audio edition quickly became an underground bestseller. For its insights into the inner life of women, it established Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes as one of the most important voices of our time in the fields of Jungian psychology, myth, and women's mysteries.
Drawing from her work as a psychoanalyst and cantadora ("keeper of the old stories"), Dr. Estes uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit. Through an exploration into the nature of the…
This book begins the After Ever After trilogy, a fairy tale of deep relationships beyond the "happily ever after" union where most love stories end. Cinderella overcomes childhood self-denial to stand equal beside her king; Belle yearns secretly for the passionate Beast her prince used to be; Snow White, raised in the wilderness by demigods of old, seeks her own human self in that trickster mirror; and Sleeping Beauty wakes to find her primeval land destroyed—but her forgotten, hundred-year dream holds the key to renewal.
In this first book, the Wicked Witch lures them all closer, across mountains and kingdoms, through shadowy rituals, dreams, and letters of longing, to discover the forbidden feminine magic that will transform them into queens and reconnect a broken world.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
