UK reviews:

‘The three unique stories in The Fool and Other Moral Tales have a folk tale sense of the familiar and the perverse. They invite us into something playful, but it is the reader who gets toyed with... While described as moral tales, these stories do not give straightforward choices about good and evil. Instead we must scale their ambiguities and allusions with only the slightest of finger holds.’ — Rónán Hession, Irish Times

‘Anne Serre is a remarkable and unusual writer; her pen a scalpel dissecting the human condition with painful precision. The Fool & Other Moral Tales – three novellas – are lyrical and disturbing, wonderful and terrible, arousing and devastating. Their hallucinatory, and at times nightmarish quality, is beautifully rendered by translator Mark Hutchinson.’ — Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast

US reviews:

‘Serre, one of France’s finest fabulists, returns in full force in this strange, beguiling collection about the perils of desire in all its forms.’ —Kirkus Reviews

‘With its psychological reality infused with fabulism, Serre’s fiction seems to have invented its own genre of literature. The Fool and Other Moral Tales is an impeccable collection.’—Ankita Chakraborty, The New York Times

‘From the author of the brilliant novel, The Governesses, comes another beguiling piece of art, this time a collection of three novellas exploring desire and morality.’—Three Percent

‘Three surreal, fairy-tale infused tales, translated from the French, all of them playful, odd, and definitely exploratory.’—Emily Temple, The Astrology Book Club, LitHub

‘Serre’s collection speaks bravely, poignantly and perversely to the hazards of alienation – from one’s self, from those around you – while also illuminating the blessings and curses, the gifts and sacrifices, of being called to dwell in the gauzy world of stories.’ —John Biscello, Riot Material

‘Three wild novellas – tied together with dream logic, each of these stories plumbs the depths of desire, morality, and our willingness to go on an unpredictable ride.’ —Katie Yee, LitHub

‘These three stories are provocative and original works which explore the complexity of desire and the friction created by the pleasures and dangers deriving from its fulfillment. It is a subject which inevitably raises questions of morality. Serre’s preferred form of the fable allows her to explore these tangled subjects with if not freedom then at least with insouciance. It is an ingenious choice of conceit; we can only hope that more of Serre’s writing appears in English translation, and soon.’—Tristan Foster, Music & Literature

‘Drawing on fairy tales and psychoanalysis, pornography and poststructuralism, Serre constructs stunning and searing stories. Dreamy and deeply sexual.’—Publishers Weekly

Further praise for Anne Serre:

‘Genuinely original – and, often, very quietly so. Seriously weird and seriously excellent…call it the anglerfish of literature.’—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

‘Anne Serre’s style is perfectly controlled. Colorful, by turns elegant and violent, it provokes that enchantment borne out of an unbridled imagination.’—Marie Claire

‘Hypnotic, enchanting.’—Publishers Weekly

‘Serre’s language is tight and fabulist, a slim and sensuous fairy tale that reads like something born from an orgy between Charles Perrault, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter.’—Full Stop

US reviews:

Thirty-One Books by Women in Translation, Pierce Alquist, Three Percent, August 2020
Hazards Of Alienation In The Fool (and Other Moral Tales), John Biscello, Riot Material, 9 December 2019
Anne Serre’s The Fool, Tristan Foster, Music & Literature, 26 November 2019
New French Fiction: From Farm to Table, With Feasting in Between, Ankita Chakraborty, The New York Times, 25 October 2019
The Fool and Other Moral Tales, Publishers Weekly, 12 July 2019
Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019, Part 2, LitHub, July 2019