Traveling through the vast universe of Magical Land literature, we resemble the King and Queen through the looking glass, whose inhabited world fits into the room of a little girl named Alice Liddell. It is both vast and tiny. Like the worlds of The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, and The Lord of the Rings—we all visited them in childhood and adolescence. Nikolai Epple's book is a way to return to this universe as adults. To see its structure, to understand what is long known, to discover much that is new. And also to find the keys for its next guests—our children.

Magical Land literature is a movement that eludes strict genre definitions. Philologist, translator, and English literature specialist Nikolai Epple describes it as the story of an intense internal dialogue between very different authors, yet belonging to a single, clearly traceable tradition. "When reference points are lost, black becomes white, and white becomes black. A magical land, in which, as MacDonald says, everything except moral law is arbitrary, is a means not to escape reality, but to remind oneself and one's neighbors of it," says Nikolai Epple.

The reprint is adorned with photographs of English writers, illustrations to their works, reproductions of graphic art and paintings, manuscripts, and first edition covers.