Sheherezade

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Janet Zweig

Holly Anderson

Sheherezade, Long Island City, NY, 1988, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

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Warren Lehrer

On Warren Lehrer’s Book List

This 1988 reconsideration of the Sheherezade story from One Thousand and One Nights also reconsiders the notion and experience of a flipbook. A more traditional flipbook, made of drawings of a woman repeatedly putting on a cape, takes place on the lefthand page. The text part takes place on the recto side beginning with the name Sheherezade, which gets larger and larger (and more and more degraded—as in bad photocopy enlargement) until the first of Holly Anderson’s texts emerges from within one of the negative spaces inside the letter e. That text enlarges until another text emerges from inside one of its letters, etc, etc. Although you can fan through this thick volume and enjoy the flip, the reader needs to change the pace in order to read the stories that are told—must be told—as a means of staying alive.

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