Grass’s co-opting of animal fables, his extensive use of talking flounders, rats, and toads, grows from his absorption in the wonder tales of Germany, as collected by the Brothers Grimm.

My advice would be a little different. Only write what you know if what you know is really interesting.

This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.

As a migrant myself, I have always been fascinated by the migration of stories, and these jackal tales traveled almost as far as the Arabian Nights narratives, ending up in both Arabic and Persian versions, in which the jackals’ names have mutated into Kalila and Dimna. They also ended up in Hebrew and Latin and eventually, as The Fables of Bidpai,

Sadly, of the Hazar Afsaneh itself not a single copy survives. This book is the great “missing link” of world literature, the fabled volume through which the wonder tales of India traveled west to encounter, eventually, the Arabic language and to turn into The Thousand Nights and One Night,

The book that we now usually call The Arabian Nights didn’t originate in the Arab world. Its probable origin is Indian; Indian story compendiums too have a fondness for frame stories, for Russian-doll-style stories within stories, and for animal fables.

the children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.

Yet their power endures; and it does so, I believe, because for all their cargo of monsters and magic, these stories are entirely truthful about human nature (even when in the form of anthropomorphic animals). All human life is here, brave and cowardly, honorable and dishonorable, straight-talking and conniving, and the stories ask the greatest and

We were not Hindus, my family, but we believed the great stories of Hinduism to be available to us also.