Otherwise Fables

“Dazzlingly witty” — CYNTHIA OZICK

Otherwise Fables is the first complete collection of Oscar Mandel’s fiction, including the Gobble-Up Stories and the novellas The History of Sigismund, Prince of Poland , and Chi Po and the Sorcerer . As witty as Sedaris and as profound as Calderón, Mandel’s little moral tales are full of unexpected points, deep lessons, ethical ambiguity, and dry wit. Slyly subversive tales of magicians, princes, and animals will delight readers young and old with intellectually sophisticated examples of philosophical allegory and compelling storytelling. Mandel’s timeless tales raise challenging questions of modern culture with panache, charm, and magic.

Oscar Mandel is a Belgian-born American author and professor emeritus of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His fabulist fiction has been widely staged and his many published works range across the fields of poetry, drama, fiction, the essay, literary scholarship and theory, translations (especially from French and German), and art history. He lives in Paris, France, and Los Angeles, California.