Fairy Tale Review Archive
Browse submissions from past editions, web exclusive content, author Q&A, and more.
The practice of retelling fairy tales in the form of literary fiction is, if not quite hallowed, certainly established. The great Angela Carter’s revelatory 1979 story collection, “The Bloody Chamber” — a brocaded work of heady sensuality, intelligence and violence — remains the benchmark, but Kate Bernheimer’s Fairy Tale Review and the several excellent Bernheimer-edited anthologies spun off from it carry the standard forward. Those are just some of the more overt homages; Western literature owes as much to fairy tales as it does to Greek myth and the Bible.
-The New York Times
The Lilac Issue Editor’s Note | Kate Bernheimer
This Editor’s Note has three parts. As with all of my Editor’s Notes, I ask that you daydream while you read it. My students are often delighted...
Insomnia | Dana Curtis
Curled on a couch, wrapped in seaweed and crystalline pastimes, the alkali like so many horses dead in the dry reservoir, I turned the weather away...
Before | Joy Baglio
Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice,...
The Winners of the 2019 Flash Fairy Tale Contest
On February 26, 2019, we asked our Twitter followers to tell us the biggest and most beautiful stories they could within Twitter's longer, and more...
Diptych: The Bunch, Your Duck/Dog
One day, we came home from a walk in the woods and found something waiting for us. It wasn’t a this, or a that, or a they; it was a bunch.
‘Mollie & Lobo Wolf Girl’ & ‘Notes on the Tower’
you are always
walking me
into canyons
at dusk…
Of Humankind
On a dirt street, in a one-room shack with a rain-tempered roof, lived a woman who sold sex to the workers of her district, and she did this because of all the ways one made money in the hard-mouthed world, this was the easiest for her.
‘Song for My Daughter,’ ‘Song for My Son,’ & ‘Out of the Wood-‘
Because my bridegroom marked the trail
with ash
Because my father pushed me
down the path alone
Winners of the 2018 Fairy Tale Review Awards in Poetry and Prose
As always, we were stunned by the high quality of the submissions we received, and so grateful to our esteemed final judges.
Homecoming
We were always trying to get her attention. ‘Your mother is busy,’ said our father. ‘She is an important woman.’
Three Enter the Dark Wood
It’s the one about the bears and their blonde:
In their many beds I left many cells,
called my multiple personalities down
‘D’ & ‘G’
D is for dragon and damsel, diamond and diadem. For deciduous woods, their dropping leaves.
In Which Hansel Is Gretel and Gretel Is Hansel
This hurts a lot, but it’s true. It is astral projection gone wrong.
Planting Petals
My sister puts petals back into the earth.
Winter Father Persimmon Sleep
as a child I couldn’t sleep
my parents tried ignoring me holding me
stroking fingers down my back
but still I cried into the winter nights
