Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ cannot be improved. One of the rare fables to feature a single protagonist, it is concise, complete, and memorable, etched into our culture with the phrase ‘sour grapes.’ Fable as dialogue Typically, the substance of a fable is a dialogue—a negotiation, a trick, a contest, sometimes little more than […]

THE FROGS WHO DESIRED A KING Funny, surreal, and brutal, ‘The Frogs Who Desired a King‘ is one of the strongest and historically most popular of Aesop fables. At its core, there is a cautionary ‘careful what you wish for’ message, but it is the political applications that account for its longevity. This is the […]

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #11 Foxes, lions, sheep, frogs, jackdaws, snakes, monkeys talking to each other or to themselves. This has been the substance of a fable from the beginning, from the oral traditions of the Indian Subcontinent to the translators of Aesop and beyond. Why? Because the distance between us (as storyteller […]

Fables are simple narratives, often rendered in simple language, and as such easily dismissed as being ‘for children.’ Unfairly so. The Victorians may have put them to use in the nursery, but they were never intended for the younger reader. These sometimes harsh lessons on pride and vanity, on the exercise of power, tactics and […]

The fable of ‘The Two Dogs’ has a simple premise: a man has two dogs, one he takes hunting, while the other remains at home on guard duty; he feeds them equal portions. This seems fair enough, but the hunting dog is not satisfied. It feels it deserves a greater share, especially when it comes […]