Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism, and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols.

"[A] piercing, playful use of ideas.... Warner moves with a high-wire walker's assurance, from Ovid, Bosch and Dante to James Hogg's 'Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,' Stevenson's 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and on to Nabokov's 'Lolita' and even Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.' In addition, she makes several seductive moves toward that enormous threat to intellectual history, the movies.... Especially when looking at Bosch, Warner sees something like fluency in the rampant, exhilarating way forms can find new shapes. This is Warner at her playful best."--The New York Times Book Review

"In this typically agile meditation, [Warner] rewardingly charts shifting images of the imagination itself.... What makes Fantastic Metamorphoses remarkable is its dashing investigation of imagination."--The Observer

"Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds makes a compelling case for the exploration of creation, evolution, growth, and decay. Warner not only accomplishes her goal of showing how other worlds are created in art but she indeed opens the door to those other worlds by taking readers on a journey where ghosts, mythological beings, zombies, and fairies become their faithful partners."--Dolores Flores-Silvia, Roanoke College

"Rules of thumb: (1) genuinely scholarly books are no delight to read, and (2) "antiquarian" studies do not illuminate the life and culture of (post)modern readers. Exception: Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds.... This irresistibly styled and splendidly illustrated treatment of generation, evolution, growth, and decay touches most of the mythological--and many of the literary-artistic--bases, but goes beyond them to encompass photography, cultural anthropology, folklore, and lepidoptery."--Virginia Quarterly Review

"Warner offers a perceptive analysis of the genre of fantastic art.... Makes a compelling case for the importance of exploration of creation, evolution, growth, and decay."--Sixteenth Century Journal

"The four essays in this book offer profound and probing searches into metamorphoses as the 'principle of organic vitality as well as the pulse in the body of art'.... A rewarding venture through a revised Western history of ideas. Highly recommended."--Choice