One Aladdin Two Lamps

Critic and fiction writer Winterson (Night Side of the River) anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Casting herself as Aladdin, Winterson examines contemporary ills from climate change to doomscrolling—and more timeless concerns from misogyny to religion—in freewheeling essays that invite readers to take a closer look at the fabric of their daily lives. One minute, Winterson is proclaiming that social media’s “weapons of mass distraction... shrink the human mind” and declaring phone addiction “a miserable way to live”; the next, she exalts fiction’s power to illuminate “inner realities that gradually press forward into our outer circumstance.” Faith in story eventually emerges as the book’s main concern, with Winterson encouraging readers to apply a literary analyst’s lens to the problems of today: “The present is often provisional,” she writes. “We don’t understand it till it’s over.” Though the concepts can be dense, Winterson’s language is accessible and unfussy, and an irrepressible sense of play animates the project. By the time it’s over, readers will feel like they’re seeing the world around them through brand new eyes. Agent: Caroline Michel, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop. (Jan.)