Here are 80 books that Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales fans have personally recommended if you like
Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales.
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As an American who writes about the history of the Soviet Union, I am constantly trying to understand people separated from me by identity, ideology, language—and time. Applying strategies for empathizing across political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries is, in many ways, the basic task of historical research. At a moment of intense political polarization, the task has become more necessary than ever. My most recent book examines this process by retracing the American journey of two Soviet travelers. Their willingness to laugh at themselves allowed them, at least sometimes, to set aside their presuppositions and see the alien land of the capitalists and the world of socialism anew.
The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.
The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.
In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.
His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.
I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.
Freud’s highly influential essay—reprinted in pamphlet form by bookseller Hugo Heller—argues that the Austrian author Wilhelm Jenson translated his daydreams into aesthetic form. This focus on the internal life of the author became widely influential to interwar modernism.
I am as interested in Freud’s analysis of Jenson as an author and his central protagonist Norbert Hanold, as he idealizes the memory of a childhood loss of his beloved that he associates to the Gradiva bas-relief as I am with the establishment of Freud the critic, analyst, and writer.
Around the same time Freud first delivered this paper as a lecture at Heller’s bookstore, he provided the bookseller Hugo Heller with his personalized list of the 10 Most Influential Books that Heller used to advertise his authors and sell books.
I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.
Morgan illuminates and analyzes the visual culture of religion that scholars have neglected to consider seriously. His lyrical and incisive deep dive into the visual aspects and social contexts of a broad range of case histories, including religious Americana, opens up the “field” of visuality beyond the object itself and to the phenomenology of seeing.
'Sacred gaze' denotes any way of seeing that invests its object - an image, a person, a time, a place - with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, "The Sacred Gaze" discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret…
I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.
A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires.
Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.
Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library-no exception to this trend-was filled with individual photographs and images in books. According to Mary Bergstein, these photographs also profoundly shaped Freud's thinking in ways that were no less important because they may have been involuntary and unconscious.In Mirrors of Memory, lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the photos from Freud's voluminous collection, she argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of…
I have always loved a good sassy sidekick, human or otherwise. I started my first book, DragonBond, at the age of fifteen, and throughout the various drafts between its inception and its completion, the dragon Axen’s sass game has always been fierce. Since then, I’ve published a total of thirteen books, seven of which are in the Endonshan Chronicles series. I have a Master’s degree in psychology which I use to create well-rounded characters with unique quirks and personalities. I hope you enjoy these picks and all the snark contained within!
This fun adventure features Alex, a bond man, and his wolf, Tala, who isn’t afraid to get her paws dirty or set Alex straight whenever he goes out of line. The two of them must deal with unjust accusations, banishment, a foreign land, and the intricacies of romance while assassins hunt them and a corrupt prince does everything in his power to bring them down. I found the relationship between Alex and Tala endearing throughout the novel, and I especially enjoyed Tala's larger-than-life personality.
An unjust beating leaves warrior Alex scarred and deformed, unfit for duty—until a voice calls him to the forests. He is chosen to bond with Tala, a silver wolf, and share a telepathic link. She heals his injuries, and he uses his enhanced abilities to serve his people. He just has to avoid the royal family.
Prince Donal isn't satisfied ruling his realm. He also wants the smaller nation to the south. But Alex and the wolves stand in Donal’s way. He frames Alex for the murder of a foreign diplomat and deploys hunters to eradicate…
I'm a writer and poet who loved reading books set in fantasy worlds like Narnia as a child. When I began writing for children, I realised my own magical experiences had been on family trips to India, where goddesses and temples, palaces swarming with monkeys, ice-capped mountains, and elephant rides were part of everyday life. The term ‘magic realism’ seemed to better fit my own fantasy world, Indica. Here, elemental magic is rooted in the myths and culture of young hero Minou Moonshine, expanding her experiences and guiding the search for her destiny. The children’s books I've chosen also contain supernatural and magical elements which are intrinsic to the protagonist’s world – no wardrobe needed!
Wolf Lightdazzled me with its original premise. Three girls, born in different lands on the same day – Zula from Mongolia, Adoma from Ghana, and Linet from Cornwall – communicate through magic.
Zula is a shaman’s daughter, and her father shows her how to connect with her sisters, all destined to be guardians of the earth. Zula’s mountain home is threatened by copper-mining, Adoma’s forest by gold prospectors, and Linet is the guardian of the Linet Lake.
When their homelands are threatened, the girls must use their shared powers to defend them, at great cost to themselves.
'She weaves ancient storytelling magic into words of exceptional beauty... Everyone should read Badoe' Sophie Anderson, author of The House with Chicken Legs.
A leopard dances under the moon. A wolf prowls. A red-beaked bird flies free.
Three girls born on the same day in wolf light are bound together to protect the world. They can dazzle or destroy. They have wind-song and fire-fury at their fingertips, but their enemies are everywhere.
From the bleak steppes to the tropical forests of Ghana and the stormy moors of Cornwall, the lands they love are plundered and poisoned. The girls must rally…
Music has been a passion ever since I joined my mother’s hippie jam sessions as a toddler. During my 17 years as a professional cellist-in-training, I tried Yo-Yo Ma’s Stradivarius and played Pachelbel’s Canon at a gazillion weddings. I even made it to Carnegie Hall, performing in a university orchestra on the gilded stage. But injuries, both physical and psychological, put an end to my classical music career. Trying to forget my cello years, I entered journalism, eventually becoming a staff health reporter at Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Later, when a percussion workshop triggered a dramatic shift in my perspective, I answered the call to explore music in a more expansive way.
This book enticed me with the audacity of its premise: a quasi-mystical connection between classical music and the feral nature of wolves.
Renowned pianist Hélène Grimaud grew up a rambunctious child in southern France who found meaning in the melodies of long-dead composers. Years later, on a dark Florida night, she has a chance encounter with a wolf. Lupine mythologies permeate her story, and psyche.
No longer content to admire wolves from a distance, she later founds a wolf conservation centre in upstate New York. While this book may not be a literary tour-de-force, I was enthralled by the theme of “rewilding” music.
An acclaimed French pianist describes her life-changing first encounter with a wolf hybrid in 1991, her efforts to protect the threatened wolf species, and her foundation of a wolf preserve on the grounds of her New York State home. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
Throughout my childhood, my mother repeated the mantra, “Love your own, leave others alone.” Her purpose was to prevent me and my siblings from begging to keep every animal we saw. Arguably, the phrase had some impact because we obviously didn’t bring home every animal. (But we also adopted a opossum from the backyard and named him Mr. Jenkins, so you be the judge.) For as long as I can remember, I have loved finding fantasy adventure books that feature the animals I love so much as trusted companions. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I do!
Again, who doesn’t love an animal sidekick? Especially if that companion is a wolf who has a special gift in which she can judge people’s character and is dedicated to protecting those in her “pack!”
Lady Jewel is a large white wolf who is an important companion to our primary protagonists, Lord Adamo and Sephone Winters. Pair this loyal wolf with a post-apocalyptic fantasy world in which memory trading is a lucrative business, and you have an intriguing narrative for adult readers (and, like all titles in this list, it’s clean, too)!
When I was young, I read Bambi…and it made me want to go hunting. Perhaps I missed the point. But at the time, I thought Bambi’s exploits sounded much like the animal yarns my dad brought home from his autumnal hunting trips. Both fascinated me. I loved the idea of getting a glimpse into a secret world where animals starred in their own stories and people were, at most, part of the scenery. As an environmental historian, I’ve tried to wring those kinds of stories out of historical documents that are much more suited for telling us about human actions and desires.
Like Isenberg, Coleman focuses on a single wild creature and its changing historical relationship with humans. Wolves went from hated in early America to loved (at least by some) in modern times. Vicioustraces wolves’ shifting American identity and explains how that transformation occurred. Coleman offers a challenging thesis—one that draws upon biology, folklore, and history to explain the viciousness of American attacks on wolves. Though one may argue with his methods, his research is unquestionably innovative. I am particularly impressed with Coleman’s efforts to give voice to the wild creatures he studies. Wolves play a protagonist’s role in his reading of American colonization, and this is an interpretation I wholeheartedly endorse.
A provocative history of wolves in America and of the humans who first destroyed them and now offer them protection
"A shocking cultural study of our long, sadistic crusade against wolves. Moving brilliantly through history, economics, and biology, Coleman...explains America's fevered obsession with these animals."-Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
Over a continent and three centuries, American livestock owners destroyed wolves to protect the beasts that supplied them with food, clothing, mobility, and wealth. The brutality of the campaign soon exceeded wolves' misdeeds. Wolves menaced property, not people, but storytellers often depicted the animals as ravenous threats to human safety.…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
Let me start with a confession: I don’t care about wolves—or at least, I thought I didn’t until I read this book. Now, I’m mildly obsessed. I see a wolf on screen or mentioned in the news, and my adrenaline spikes; I feel excited. I now know about OR-7, the wolf that migrated from the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon to the southern Cascade Range.
I discovered that wolves are family animals, despite what we may have thought, and that they average a speed of 5 miles per hour. And somehow, learning all this was fun because this book wasn’t actually about wolves at all; it was about the idea of wolves—in history, in culture—and therefore, actually about so much more, including the author herself. I couldn’t put it down.
For fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry’s WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon
OREGON BOOK AWARD WINNER * Shortlisted for the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award * A Most Anticipated Book of 2023: TIME, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Salon, Bustle, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Reader's Digest, LitHub, Book Riot, Debutiful, and more!
"Exhilarating." ―The Washington Post
"Wolfish starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender,…
