The Italian Author Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved
children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize.
But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an
activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He
is one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors for children,
and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and
linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language,
metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was
all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote The Grammar of Fantasy, a
radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a
forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial"
and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of
Rodari’s works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his
humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such
as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty.
Forty years after his death, Rodari’s writing is as powerful and
innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.
Valerio Vidali is an Italian illustrator of children's
books. His book Jemmy Button (Templar/Candlewick, 2013),
co-authored with Jennifer Uman, was a New York Times Best
Illustrated Book of 2013. His book The Forest, co-illustrated with
Violeta Lopíz was published by Enchanted Lion in 2018.
Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator, working out
of Italian and French. He once interviewed the creator of Topo
Gigio.
“The stories range in tone from the fanciful to the absurd to
the philosophical. What they have in common is brevity—Bianchi
‘couldn’t afford to make extended long-distance phone calls’—and a
subversive quality that would seem to reflect the
author’s communist leanings ... All sorts of imaginative leaps
take place in this handsome book” —Wall Street Journal
"There are a lot of stories to love in this Italian export. Rodari
is a master storyteller; his imagination knows no bounds from
runaway noses, buildings made of ice cream, magical carousels, and
an elevator to the stars. Each story is thoughtful and well
constructed as Rodari plays delightfully with different themes."
—School Library Journal
"Gianni Rodari is considered the most innovative Italian children's
writer of the 20th century. His countless stories and rhymes tend
to end well, but in the teeth of evidence. Telephone Tales offers
68 of them ably translated by Antony Shugaar with illustrations by
Valerio Vidali... For Rodari, the children's story is always an act
of generosity which favors a process of initiation and liberation."
—The London Review of Books
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