Post by fellbelow on Jul 25, 2006 12:21:00 GMT -5
Here's a paper I had to write for the final in my English 397 (Study of poetry) class. We could use any of the poets we had studied that semester and any other writers we wanted and write a paper on the topic of our choice! I chose to write on the use of the Fairy Tale in modern lit. and I used our studies of Anne Sexton's "Transformations" poems and a couple of my current favorite writers. Hope you guys can enjoy!
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They have been with us since were old enough to be read to or told a story. When we were young they brought us entertainment and often instilled within us the foundations of what would later become the structures of our morals and character. They are fairy tales and though it may be implied that we are meant to grow out of them, many people find it comforting to return to them throughout their lives. Many of the great authors of our time and the past have found fairy tales to be a great source of material. Their views on fairy tales can be contradicting, however, with many of them expressing a disillusionment with the typical “fairy tale” ending and at the same time latching to these stories for the comfort they found in their childhood. A few authors have even taken to writing their own, modern fairy tales. Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the novels of Gregory Maguire, and the short stories of Neil Gaiman all express the modern writer’s disillusionment with happy endings and vilification of characters of circumstance while also showing the need for more adult-oriented fairy tales, and Sexton’s Transformations also shows an interesting take on feminism in fairy tales. These are just a few ways that the fairy tale’s influence is felt in modern literature, but they are the ones that will be explored in this article.
Many writers through the ages have embraced the fairy tale ending of “happily ever after.” They have taken it and ran with it to sell their stories and gain widespread popularity and notariety. However, there are the select few that feel this ending is too perfect or too easy. These non-conformists choose to take a road less traveled and twist the happy ending to their liking, and very often “their liking” entails an ironically tragic re-telling of the fairy tales we have come to know and love. Anne Sexton demonstrated this extremely well in her book of poems called Transformations that re-write the Grimm’s Fairy Tales to be more tragic and show a sympathy with many of the villains in the original tales. Two of our contemporary authors also do this very well. Gregory Maguire has made a career of taking classic tales and telling them without the slant towards one side they generally get, and Neil Gaiman is a prominent fantasy writer who is best known for weaving his own fairy tales but can also perform the task of re-telling old tales without their bias. One classic tale that all three of these writers has tackled in turn is the story of Snow White. They have done so in three different mediums: Sexton’s poem “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Maguire’s novel “Mirror, Mirror,” and Gaiman’s short story, “Snow, Glass, Apples.”
In Sexton’s poem, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the reader may not initially see the sympathy for the Queen. The poem seems to just be a re-telling of the old tale and nothing more than just a poetic form for the story. However, if one looks deeper at the Queen’s predicament then they will surely see the manner in which Sexton evokes sympathy from the reader. The Queen has been the beauty of the land for years and now has to deal with a young, headstrong girl taking her place. Any woman in the world should be able to sympathize with the Queen and her actions. The best way that Sexton is able to show us empathy for the Queen is in her description of Snow White and her actions. Sexton gives us two instances of the Queen attempting to murder Snow White in the Dwarfs’ cottage. The first comes when the Queen disguises herself as a peddler and goes to the cottage. Ever after being warned not to open the door while the Dwarfs were away, Snow White allows herself to be sold a bit of lacing and then allows the Queen to tie it around her waist. Naturally, the Queen ties is so tight that Snow White can’t breathe and promptly faints. The Dwarfs show up in time to save Snow White and warn her again not to open the door while they are away. Here, in the Queen’s second attempt at murder, Sexton describes Snow White as a “dumb bunny,” which she is. Snow White has now allowed herself to fooled twice and in showing Snow White’s stupidity and her over-trusting nature, Sexton seems to be trying to convey a sense that a reader should not feel sorry for her. When she bites into the poison apple, Snow White has then allowed herself to be fooled twice by this old Queen. Such naivety would not be pitied in real life, so why should it be pitied in fantasy? This seems to be the question Sexton is posing to readers.
Gregory Maguire is probably most famous right for his fantastic re-telling of the fabled Wizard of Oz history from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view that he aptly titled Wicked. What many people don’t know is that he has undertaken the re-elaborating of a few other timeless tales, one such tale being that of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While Wicked is a grand re-mastering of a story within the original’s own time and place, Maguire’s novel Mirror, Mirror takes the tale out of a land “far, far away” and places in a historically recognizable time period. This time is 1502, and this place is Italy. While the majority of the characters remain fictional, a pivotal two are assigned to major historical personifications of evil, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia.
The family itself was notorious for its hedonistic life-style, but Lucrezia was infamous on her own for her affinity for poisoning people to gain rank and status in society. This is appropriate considering that Maguire places her in the shoes of the evil stepmother. Though she is not actually Bianca’s (the name applied to Snow White in this version) stepmother, she is put into position of guardian after Cesare sends Bianca’s father Vincente on a quest for a branch from the fabled Tree of Life. When Cesare’s quest leaves Vincente gone for many years and he begins to take a liking to the blossoming young Bianca, Lucrezia becomes insanely jealous and thus the original tale of her quest to kill Bianca is woven into the plot.
This telling is told mainly from Lucrezia’s perspective, however, and a reader finds it very easy to sympathize with her for the same reasons Sexton was able to provoke empathy for her Queen. Lucrezia knows the corrupt ways she tends toward and the reader is constantly reminded of her guilt for this throughout th novel. At the same time, she knows that there is no other way for her to be and that no matter how hard she may try she will never be able to change. Bianca is not portrayed as stupid in the novel as in Sexton’s poem, but instead she is shown to be the innocent, ignorantly wonderful child of the timeless fairy tale we all know. Despite her sickeningly sweet demeanor, however, Maguire is still able to provoke intense feelings of pity for Lucrezia as she struggles through trying to mentally allow herself to become a better person but inevitably failing.
Gaiman’s short story, Snow, Glass, Apples, is the only one of these three works to out-right vilify our pale-complected heroine. In his story the reader finds it very easy to side with the “evil” Queen because he puts on Snow White the dress of a vampire. She is shown throughout the story as a life-stealing, manipulative demon-child, and the Queen is merely trying to rid her kingdom of a plague.
Snow White sneaks into her father’s room every night and drains blood from him. The Queen notices his deteriorating health and becomes suspicious so she locks his chamber door one night. Snow White then comes to the Queen’s chambers and attempts to drain blood from her but the Queen staves her off. The hunter hired to cut out Snow White’s heart in this story fulfills his job and brings the heart back to the Queen who hangs it above her bed so that she can keep an eye on it. This is now, however, the end of Snow White. She is of course found and revived by the dwarfs, who are nothing but little miscreants and freaks outcast from society. Snow White returns to the castle with her new slave, her Prince Charming, and they reveal to everyone what the Queen has done. Since no one knows the truth about Snow White but the Queen, the people of the castle and the town burn the Queen alive in a furnace and Snow White and her prince live “happily ever after.”
Gaiman gets straight to the point in his telling of the Snow White tale. Whereas in the works of Sexton and Maguire the Queen was in fact evil but conflicted, in Gaiman’s story the Queen is sorely misunderstood and Snow White is, in fact, the true villain of the tale. All three of these authors do a fine job of re-telling their tales, and they all do an equally fine job of conveying that we should not always take things at face value but should look at all sides of a story before condemning some characters.
Sexton and Gaiman both also toy with the irony of a “happily ever after” ending. It is clear that they, as writers, have become disillusioned with the thought of this perfect ending and they show it well. A few of Sexton’s final lines in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” are, “Meanwhile Snow White held court,/ rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut/ and sometimes referring to her mirror/ as women do.” In these closing lines Sexton is able to show the irony in that Snow White ended up exactly where her stepmother had been. Her ending place is on a thrown staring at her mirror in wonder at how fair she is and living there in an almost doll-like state. So while she lives without the hounding of the Queen to kill her, she has become that which she ran from.
Gaiman’s ending has more straight-forward irony for the reader, mainly because his story is just more straight-forward in general. Snow White has returned from her exile and usurped her stepmother as Queen and is now free to live her life as she pleases. The irony is that the very people that cast the Queen, their one true shot at salvation from this vampiress, into the furnace will be the ones that allow Snow White to live “happily ever after” by feeding off of them. In Gaiman’s story the prince is the one who is almost doll-like because of the hold that Snow White has over him as she drains more and more blood and life from him.
Both of these endings convey and extreme disillusionment with the fairy tales endings that have been so sorely shoved down the throats of readers and the like for years. They express how one can only take so much candy sweetness before everything begins to take a bittersweet taste. Gaiman and Sexton have each, in turn, tackled the tale and its happy ending and each has put their own sick, ironic twist on it. The end product is a unanimous cry for a more realistic and adult-oriented tale.
Feminism is a big topic in literature and it’s no surprise that fairy tales have caught a large brunt of the attack on their portrayal of women. Often is these stories women are shown to be trophies for men, objects to sought after and shown off once they are attained. Not only that, but little girls growing up with these stories are taught that men will look at them and only have them if they are pretty by society’s standards. Little girls are taught to place a huge importance on the outward appearances of those around them and that the people they come in contact with can have their character judged just by looking at them. They are taught that ugly equals evil and that pretty equals good. This, as most everyone knows, is hardly ever so in reality. Still, all the same, these are the things that fairy tales teach the young ladies of today as they grow older. While this may have been acceptable at one point, it has become and increasingly hot topic over the years and those beliefs are now held as taboo and wrong. (Though they do still exist.) Anne Sexton tackles the issue of feminist portrayals in fairy tales in almost all of the poems she wrote for her book, Transformations. Two of the easiest poems in this collection to find the feminist message in are “Cinderella” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Sexton takes these two timeless tales and picks out the ways in which they cause readers to condescend women. She does this deftly and magically in these poems and provokes deep thoughts on the ways women are portrayed in the original tales.
Sexton does her best to take the focus of her poem “Cinderella” off of how ugly the step-sisters and move it to how black hearted and cold they are. She says that they are “pretty enough” but have “hearts like blackjacks.” Through these descriptions Sexton does a very good job of moving the focus to where she wants it. In doing this she is able to downplay the importance of outward appearances in social situations and relationships.
While she revises through downplaying the importance of the looks of the sisters in one part of her poem, Sexton revises through emphasis in another part. When she begins to talk about the self-mutilation that the step-sisters go through in order to fit their feet into the glass slipper (one sister cuts off her toe, the other her heel), she is emphasizing what women in modern times go through every day to conform to the cookie-cutter layouts that society has made for them. Every day women forgo self-advancing opportunities, stress about their weight, and go through many other degrading motions in order to please society and the men within it.
In “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” Sexton tackles completely different issues of feminine portrayal than she did in “Cinderella” and does it much more subtly. First of all, the sarcastic way in which she refers to Snow White as having eyes “shut for the thrust of the unicorn...unsoiled...a lovely virgin,” is a blatant attack on how society holds the chastity of women above all other aspects as desirable and associates it with beauty. Women are portrayed as beautiful because of their chastity and this, therefore, causes men to find virgins much more appealing. Chastity is emphasized because it makes the man’s conquest that much sweeter and that much more of an accomplishment and makes his wife that much more of a trophy. This furthers the ideal of a woman as the possession of one man and one man alone.
Sexton also attacks the way in which in the tales pits women against each other for the approval of men and the rest of society. The Queen’s spite for Snow White only appears once Snow White is labeled by the mirror as the fairest in the land. This is shown through the lines, “Suddenly one day the mirror replied,/ Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true,/ but Snow White is fairer than you. Until that moment Snow White/ had been no more important/ than a dust mouse under the bed.” Sexton points this out to attack the way in which women are constantly taught to be cut-throat and ruthless when it comes to finding a man in life and that they should not be ashamed to go to any lengths. It is plain to see that Sexton felt this is a horrible value to instill into the young women coming up today.
All in all, the fairy tale has been used in many different ways throughout the years to examine many different points, be they positive or negative. It has been used to attack its own unrealistic happy ending, the vilification of misunderstood characters, and to examine the roles that women are typically assigned in everyday life. The fairy tales is very obviously one of the most important forms of literature out there right now and it always has been. Through the years no matter if they have been used for good or bad, fairy tales have been there for writers to draw from for inspiration and this proves their timelessness.
Works Cited
Maguire, Gregory. Mirror, Mirror. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Gaiman, Neil. Smoke and Mirrors. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001.
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They have been with us since were old enough to be read to or told a story. When we were young they brought us entertainment and often instilled within us the foundations of what would later become the structures of our morals and character. They are fairy tales and though it may be implied that we are meant to grow out of them, many people find it comforting to return to them throughout their lives. Many of the great authors of our time and the past have found fairy tales to be a great source of material. Their views on fairy tales can be contradicting, however, with many of them expressing a disillusionment with the typical “fairy tale” ending and at the same time latching to these stories for the comfort they found in their childhood. A few authors have even taken to writing their own, modern fairy tales. Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the novels of Gregory Maguire, and the short stories of Neil Gaiman all express the modern writer’s disillusionment with happy endings and vilification of characters of circumstance while also showing the need for more adult-oriented fairy tales, and Sexton’s Transformations also shows an interesting take on feminism in fairy tales. These are just a few ways that the fairy tale’s influence is felt in modern literature, but they are the ones that will be explored in this article.
Many writers through the ages have embraced the fairy tale ending of “happily ever after.” They have taken it and ran with it to sell their stories and gain widespread popularity and notariety. However, there are the select few that feel this ending is too perfect or too easy. These non-conformists choose to take a road less traveled and twist the happy ending to their liking, and very often “their liking” entails an ironically tragic re-telling of the fairy tales we have come to know and love. Anne Sexton demonstrated this extremely well in her book of poems called Transformations that re-write the Grimm’s Fairy Tales to be more tragic and show a sympathy with many of the villains in the original tales. Two of our contemporary authors also do this very well. Gregory Maguire has made a career of taking classic tales and telling them without the slant towards one side they generally get, and Neil Gaiman is a prominent fantasy writer who is best known for weaving his own fairy tales but can also perform the task of re-telling old tales without their bias. One classic tale that all three of these writers has tackled in turn is the story of Snow White. They have done so in three different mediums: Sexton’s poem “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Maguire’s novel “Mirror, Mirror,” and Gaiman’s short story, “Snow, Glass, Apples.”
In Sexton’s poem, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the reader may not initially see the sympathy for the Queen. The poem seems to just be a re-telling of the old tale and nothing more than just a poetic form for the story. However, if one looks deeper at the Queen’s predicament then they will surely see the manner in which Sexton evokes sympathy from the reader. The Queen has been the beauty of the land for years and now has to deal with a young, headstrong girl taking her place. Any woman in the world should be able to sympathize with the Queen and her actions. The best way that Sexton is able to show us empathy for the Queen is in her description of Snow White and her actions. Sexton gives us two instances of the Queen attempting to murder Snow White in the Dwarfs’ cottage. The first comes when the Queen disguises herself as a peddler and goes to the cottage. Ever after being warned not to open the door while the Dwarfs were away, Snow White allows herself to be sold a bit of lacing and then allows the Queen to tie it around her waist. Naturally, the Queen ties is so tight that Snow White can’t breathe and promptly faints. The Dwarfs show up in time to save Snow White and warn her again not to open the door while they are away. Here, in the Queen’s second attempt at murder, Sexton describes Snow White as a “dumb bunny,” which she is. Snow White has now allowed herself to fooled twice and in showing Snow White’s stupidity and her over-trusting nature, Sexton seems to be trying to convey a sense that a reader should not feel sorry for her. When she bites into the poison apple, Snow White has then allowed herself to be fooled twice by this old Queen. Such naivety would not be pitied in real life, so why should it be pitied in fantasy? This seems to be the question Sexton is posing to readers.
Gregory Maguire is probably most famous right for his fantastic re-telling of the fabled Wizard of Oz history from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view that he aptly titled Wicked. What many people don’t know is that he has undertaken the re-elaborating of a few other timeless tales, one such tale being that of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While Wicked is a grand re-mastering of a story within the original’s own time and place, Maguire’s novel Mirror, Mirror takes the tale out of a land “far, far away” and places in a historically recognizable time period. This time is 1502, and this place is Italy. While the majority of the characters remain fictional, a pivotal two are assigned to major historical personifications of evil, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia.
The family itself was notorious for its hedonistic life-style, but Lucrezia was infamous on her own for her affinity for poisoning people to gain rank and status in society. This is appropriate considering that Maguire places her in the shoes of the evil stepmother. Though she is not actually Bianca’s (the name applied to Snow White in this version) stepmother, she is put into position of guardian after Cesare sends Bianca’s father Vincente on a quest for a branch from the fabled Tree of Life. When Cesare’s quest leaves Vincente gone for many years and he begins to take a liking to the blossoming young Bianca, Lucrezia becomes insanely jealous and thus the original tale of her quest to kill Bianca is woven into the plot.
This telling is told mainly from Lucrezia’s perspective, however, and a reader finds it very easy to sympathize with her for the same reasons Sexton was able to provoke empathy for her Queen. Lucrezia knows the corrupt ways she tends toward and the reader is constantly reminded of her guilt for this throughout th novel. At the same time, she knows that there is no other way for her to be and that no matter how hard she may try she will never be able to change. Bianca is not portrayed as stupid in the novel as in Sexton’s poem, but instead she is shown to be the innocent, ignorantly wonderful child of the timeless fairy tale we all know. Despite her sickeningly sweet demeanor, however, Maguire is still able to provoke intense feelings of pity for Lucrezia as she struggles through trying to mentally allow herself to become a better person but inevitably failing.
Gaiman’s short story, Snow, Glass, Apples, is the only one of these three works to out-right vilify our pale-complected heroine. In his story the reader finds it very easy to side with the “evil” Queen because he puts on Snow White the dress of a vampire. She is shown throughout the story as a life-stealing, manipulative demon-child, and the Queen is merely trying to rid her kingdom of a plague.
Snow White sneaks into her father’s room every night and drains blood from him. The Queen notices his deteriorating health and becomes suspicious so she locks his chamber door one night. Snow White then comes to the Queen’s chambers and attempts to drain blood from her but the Queen staves her off. The hunter hired to cut out Snow White’s heart in this story fulfills his job and brings the heart back to the Queen who hangs it above her bed so that she can keep an eye on it. This is now, however, the end of Snow White. She is of course found and revived by the dwarfs, who are nothing but little miscreants and freaks outcast from society. Snow White returns to the castle with her new slave, her Prince Charming, and they reveal to everyone what the Queen has done. Since no one knows the truth about Snow White but the Queen, the people of the castle and the town burn the Queen alive in a furnace and Snow White and her prince live “happily ever after.”
Gaiman gets straight to the point in his telling of the Snow White tale. Whereas in the works of Sexton and Maguire the Queen was in fact evil but conflicted, in Gaiman’s story the Queen is sorely misunderstood and Snow White is, in fact, the true villain of the tale. All three of these authors do a fine job of re-telling their tales, and they all do an equally fine job of conveying that we should not always take things at face value but should look at all sides of a story before condemning some characters.
Sexton and Gaiman both also toy with the irony of a “happily ever after” ending. It is clear that they, as writers, have become disillusioned with the thought of this perfect ending and they show it well. A few of Sexton’s final lines in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” are, “Meanwhile Snow White held court,/ rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut/ and sometimes referring to her mirror/ as women do.” In these closing lines Sexton is able to show the irony in that Snow White ended up exactly where her stepmother had been. Her ending place is on a thrown staring at her mirror in wonder at how fair she is and living there in an almost doll-like state. So while she lives without the hounding of the Queen to kill her, she has become that which she ran from.
Gaiman’s ending has more straight-forward irony for the reader, mainly because his story is just more straight-forward in general. Snow White has returned from her exile and usurped her stepmother as Queen and is now free to live her life as she pleases. The irony is that the very people that cast the Queen, their one true shot at salvation from this vampiress, into the furnace will be the ones that allow Snow White to live “happily ever after” by feeding off of them. In Gaiman’s story the prince is the one who is almost doll-like because of the hold that Snow White has over him as she drains more and more blood and life from him.
Both of these endings convey and extreme disillusionment with the fairy tales endings that have been so sorely shoved down the throats of readers and the like for years. They express how one can only take so much candy sweetness before everything begins to take a bittersweet taste. Gaiman and Sexton have each, in turn, tackled the tale and its happy ending and each has put their own sick, ironic twist on it. The end product is a unanimous cry for a more realistic and adult-oriented tale.
Feminism is a big topic in literature and it’s no surprise that fairy tales have caught a large brunt of the attack on their portrayal of women. Often is these stories women are shown to be trophies for men, objects to sought after and shown off once they are attained. Not only that, but little girls growing up with these stories are taught that men will look at them and only have them if they are pretty by society’s standards. Little girls are taught to place a huge importance on the outward appearances of those around them and that the people they come in contact with can have their character judged just by looking at them. They are taught that ugly equals evil and that pretty equals good. This, as most everyone knows, is hardly ever so in reality. Still, all the same, these are the things that fairy tales teach the young ladies of today as they grow older. While this may have been acceptable at one point, it has become and increasingly hot topic over the years and those beliefs are now held as taboo and wrong. (Though they do still exist.) Anne Sexton tackles the issue of feminist portrayals in fairy tales in almost all of the poems she wrote for her book, Transformations. Two of the easiest poems in this collection to find the feminist message in are “Cinderella” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Sexton takes these two timeless tales and picks out the ways in which they cause readers to condescend women. She does this deftly and magically in these poems and provokes deep thoughts on the ways women are portrayed in the original tales.
Sexton does her best to take the focus of her poem “Cinderella” off of how ugly the step-sisters and move it to how black hearted and cold they are. She says that they are “pretty enough” but have “hearts like blackjacks.” Through these descriptions Sexton does a very good job of moving the focus to where she wants it. In doing this she is able to downplay the importance of outward appearances in social situations and relationships.
While she revises through downplaying the importance of the looks of the sisters in one part of her poem, Sexton revises through emphasis in another part. When she begins to talk about the self-mutilation that the step-sisters go through in order to fit their feet into the glass slipper (one sister cuts off her toe, the other her heel), she is emphasizing what women in modern times go through every day to conform to the cookie-cutter layouts that society has made for them. Every day women forgo self-advancing opportunities, stress about their weight, and go through many other degrading motions in order to please society and the men within it.
In “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” Sexton tackles completely different issues of feminine portrayal than she did in “Cinderella” and does it much more subtly. First of all, the sarcastic way in which she refers to Snow White as having eyes “shut for the thrust of the unicorn...unsoiled...a lovely virgin,” is a blatant attack on how society holds the chastity of women above all other aspects as desirable and associates it with beauty. Women are portrayed as beautiful because of their chastity and this, therefore, causes men to find virgins much more appealing. Chastity is emphasized because it makes the man’s conquest that much sweeter and that much more of an accomplishment and makes his wife that much more of a trophy. This furthers the ideal of a woman as the possession of one man and one man alone.
Sexton also attacks the way in which in the tales pits women against each other for the approval of men and the rest of society. The Queen’s spite for Snow White only appears once Snow White is labeled by the mirror as the fairest in the land. This is shown through the lines, “Suddenly one day the mirror replied,/ Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true,/ but Snow White is fairer than you. Until that moment Snow White/ had been no more important/ than a dust mouse under the bed.” Sexton points this out to attack the way in which women are constantly taught to be cut-throat and ruthless when it comes to finding a man in life and that they should not be ashamed to go to any lengths. It is plain to see that Sexton felt this is a horrible value to instill into the young women coming up today.
All in all, the fairy tale has been used in many different ways throughout the years to examine many different points, be they positive or negative. It has been used to attack its own unrealistic happy ending, the vilification of misunderstood characters, and to examine the roles that women are typically assigned in everyday life. The fairy tales is very obviously one of the most important forms of literature out there right now and it always has been. Through the years no matter if they have been used for good or bad, fairy tales have been there for writers to draw from for inspiration and this proves their timelessness.
Works Cited
Maguire, Gregory. Mirror, Mirror. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Gaiman, Neil. Smoke and Mirrors. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001.