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The Pancatantra
The Pancatantra
Oct 11, 2024 8:30 AM

Author:Visnu Sarma,Sarma, Visnu,Chandra Rajan

The Pancatantra

First recorded 1500 years ago, but taking its origins from a far earlier oral tradition, the Pancatantra is ascribed by legend to the celebrated, half-mythical teacher Visnu Sarma. Asked by a great king to awaken the dulled intelligence of his three idle sons, the aging Sarma is said to have composed the great work as a series of entertaining and edifying fables narrated by a wide range of humans and animals, and together intended to provide the young princes with vital guidance for life. Since first leaving India before AD 570, the Pancatantra has been widely translated and has influenced a cast number of works in India, the Arab world and Europe, including the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales and the Fables of La Fontaine. Enduring and profound, it is among the earliest and most popular of all books of fables.

Reviews

A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale

—— Oscar Wilde

It really does turn your blood cold

—— Colm Tóibín

Technically, he is extraordinarily brilliant, and stylistically he's wonderful

—— David Lodge

Henry James is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry

—— Graham Greene

[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation

—— T. S. Eliot

The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern

—— Independent

We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves... Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark

—— Virginia Woolf

Dark, funny and disturbing

—— London Review of Books

These 10 inventive stories, set mostly in the Florida Everglades, mix satire and sophisticated whimsy

—— New York Times

Karen Russell has produced an engaging debut. Her ability to integrate mythology and the supernatural with the very contemporary...is reminiscent of Angela Carter, but unlike Carter's many imitators, Russell never descends into whimsy... In St Lucy's, humans, ghosts and animals are utterly real; and Russell sells the genuine article, a seemingly effortless writer

—— Alisa Cox , Mslexia

These are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

—— Global Review

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read

—— Prospect
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