Telephone Tales
A travelling salesman phones his daughter each night with a story, kept short because calls cost money. Sixty absurd, political, quietly subversive tales.
Rodari wrote sixty-odd tales that are absurd, political and quietly subversive, and they won him the Hans Christian Andersen Award. A man selling goods across Italy rings home each night, and the length of every story is set by what the call costs. Within that constraint he built fables about air sold by the bottle and a country made entirely of butter.
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Maria Popova
I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up.
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