About the book
A spider borrows a coat and does not give it back. A god cuts off a woman's hair for no reason anyone wrote down, loses a bet about it, and has his mouth sewn shut with a thread that has a name. A day-old baby steals fifty cattle and reverses their hoofprints so the tracks point the wrong way. A wife bakes iron griddles into twenty-one loaves and waits for a giant.
Eighteen tales of cunning from the Akan of the Gold Coast, Jamaica, Norse Iceland, archaic Greece, Ireland, ancient Egypt, the Khoikhoi and Nama of Namaqualand, Türkiye, Japan, Māori Aotearoa and the Tamil country — each retold in full, and each followed by where it actually came from: who wrote it down, in what year, for which employer, and what that did to it.
The most famous trickster in the world is not in this book. Coyote is told only in winter across a great many nations, and a printed book is read in July. Every tradition this book declined is listed in the back with the reason.
Volume Two of Under Every Sky.
