My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me at Boston Book Festival 2010 from Boston Phoenix on Vimeo.
e letters in them, bits pull out, fairies pop-up. It is a beautiful thing. Again the pictures don't do it justice, you have to have it in your hands to appreciate how good it is.
This is a story about a wonderful looking book that is coming out, and also about why Facebook sometimes makes me happy (I'm a late convert). I only found out about this forthcoming title—due out September 28th—because I saw a post from the Fairy Tale Review Facebook page, which in turn led me to the My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me Facebook page, as both journal and book are edited by tireless champion of fairy tales Kate Bernheimer.The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.The title of the book is a line from the Grimms' The Juniper Tree, which is reimagined in the book by Alissa Nutting. Make sure you 'Like' the book's Facebook page as they keep posting up tantalising little tidbits from the tales and links to some great interviews with contributors.
Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling volume-the ultimate literary costume party.
Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino.
Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.
...and it features short stories, poetry and essays inspired by 'The Little Mermaid' and other mermaid, nixy and sea witch tales. I can't wait to settle down to read it!
Issue 10 of Scheherezade’s Bequest is now online at the Cabinet Des Fées website. It's one of my favourite journals and I can't wait to settle down this evening to read it. I am also incredibly excited because I have a story in this issue.
The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People is the fourth anthology in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's Mythic Fiction Series. The anthology contains tales and poems of animal-human transformation by writers including Gregory Frost, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Delia Sherman and Jane Yolen. You can read the preface to the anthology here.
Enchanted Conversation, is an online fairy tale magazine in Blogger format. They are currently publishing four issues a year, each takes the theme of a traditional tale as its starting point. Submissions are now open for 'The Little Mermaid' issue. They are also happy to look at submissions inspired by other watery tales such as Undine and The Nixy. The deadline is the 15th May and full submission guidelines are available here.
There are so many delicious looking fairy tale treats to feast on this week. The new issue of Goblin Fruit, the fantastical poetry zine, is up. And to celebrate their fourth birthday they're giving away lovely icons, like the one to the left, for you to peruse and use (the icons have been created by Deborah J. Brannon, using Oliver Hunter's gorgeous artwork).
The second issue of Enchanted Conversation has also gone live. It's dedicated to Beauty and the Beast and is packed with retellings, reimaginings and reviews of the tale. I can't wait to dig in!
Not strictly fairy tale related, but today's Guardian contains 10 rules for writing fiction by lots of great writers. I wanted to link to it here on the basis that a. some of you may write and so find this interesting, and b. some of the writers who've contributed have done wonderful things with fairy tales.
'In the theatre especially, the sheer abundance of the plots of the Nights opened up possibilities: the book presented magical twists and turns that intrinsically lent themselves to high-spirited performance and to technical experiment. The history of the Nights on the stage is consequently intertwined with some brilliant early stagecraft for transformation scenes, flying machines, conjuring illusions, innovatory limelight and other effects (in Islington in the 1890s, the genies in Aladdin were called after the new gases, Paraffin, Benzoline and Colza).'The Arabian Nights is on at the RSC's Courtyard Theatre until the 30th January. And although the glut of seasonal fairy tale shows has now nearly passed there is Andersen's English to look forward to - a new production by Out of Joint, written by novelist Sebastian Barry:
'Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family.This should be interesting, especially as the relationship between the two writers soured after this visit. The production will be touring in Spring 2010.
To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dicken's household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the tensions in the family: undeclared passions, a son sent to serve in India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens's marriage.'
There was a new Cinderella story in yesterday's Guardian by Man Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel, with lovely illustrations by Posy Simmonds.Although, as Byatt says, the book is 'not about classic fairytales but about authored children's writing' there are mentions of Andersen and the Grimms, as well as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz - which are often considered to be fairy tale like - alongside many other important children's classics. This is a study of 'what children take and need from stories, and how this is not always what parents imagine'.'This is a grown-up book for grown-up people who haven't forgotten being childhood readers. It satisfies imagination and curiosity, revisiting things you suddenly remember clearly, telling you new things you didn't know.'
Today is the last in the Guardian's 'Great fairytales' series and the theme is 'Beastly Tales'. There's a fantastic afterword by Marina Warner which looks at the role of animals in fairy tales, I'm going to use an excerpt of it as a foreword here as I think it also serves as a good introduction to the different kinds of animal tales that feature in today's booklet:'The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss commented that animals were "bons à penser" (good to think with), and fairytales speak through beasts to explore common experiences – fear of sexual intimacy, terror and violence and injustice, struggles for survival. A tradition of articulate, anthropomorphised creatures of every kind is as old as literature itself: animal fables and beast fairytales are found in ancient Egypt and Greece and India, and the legendary Aesop of the classics has his storytelling counterparts all over the world, who use crows and ants, lions and monkeys, ravens and donkeys to satirise the follies and vices of human beings and display along the way the effervescent cunning and high spirits of the fairytale genre.
By contrast with animal fables, where something of an animal's observable, actual character helps make the point (monkeys are clever, sharks, well, shark-like, in The Heart of a Monkey from Zanzibar), the beast of fairytale romance comes in fantasy shape – mythological creatures such as a dragon, a snake, a yellow dwarf, or, as AS Byatt translates one such beast, Mme d'Aulnoy's "Le Serpentin vert", as a "great green worm". They belong in a world of romance and psychology rather than satire and practical wisdom.'
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