In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.

Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born. "Dinesen's stories come toward one like the flashes...from a lighthouse on a strange and infrequently sighted coast--a coast beautiful and precarious, for it may be the last outreach of magic, but resting on bedrock."--Eudora Welty

"These tales belong to an old and great tradition and are worthy of it." --The Nation