The Center for Fiction Presents an Evening with Jeanette Winterson

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT January 21, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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Join us in welcoming Jeanette Winterson, CBE, acclaimed author of Written on the Body and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, to celebrate the release of her metafictional new book, One Aladdin Two Lamps.

In One Aladdin Two Lamps, Winterson reimagines One Thousand and One Nights with characteristic brilliance, positioning herself as Aladdin to the legendary Shahrazad. She examines how stories shape identity and argues for the necessity of reading as an antidote to the instability of the modern world. Drawing on her life as a queer, Oxford-educated writer from a working-class background, Winterson reflects on how art and literature belong to everyone, and breaks down the boundaries between high and low culture, fact and fiction, myth and memoir.

Explore this timely, genre-defying work at Winterson’s only North American event. A special, 40th-anniversary edition of her groundbreaking memoir Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, will also be available for purchase and signing.

Featuring

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and three collections of short stories, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a popular Substack, Mind Over Matter. She lives in England.

Photo Credit: Charlotte Hadden

Featured Book

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One Aladdin Two Lamps

By Jeanette Winterson

Published by Grove Atlantic

PURCHASE

A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?

In her guise as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know. To look again. Especially to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: “I can change the story because I am the story.”

An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson’s newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future—an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.