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 Listening Tree
What made me want him? That supple, brutal kingsnake of a boy, wine-lipped and longhaired.
While Drinking Sangria
You resemble an angel created in a landfill.
Genie in Pieces
Father is the name for what guards the front door. The world outside is full of noise. A truck, a lawnmower, a dog, and then another.
Blue Funk
People love my city for its brasseries like hothouses, ardent and perverse, its breezes that smell of coffee and of the sea.
Little Red Riding Hood
Of this world we know very little.
In my little house I know green
stags leap over me when I sleep.
Create Rupture: An Interview with Mai Der Vang
I sometimes feel like I have to pull from different parts of myself when I write an essay or a poem.
The Season of Daughters
The daughters wake for the first time on his front porch and he will never know where they come from.
Playfulness in a Monstrous World: Satoshi Iwai
I feel that he enjoys being a bystander while he is struggling. That suggests how I can live in this monstrous world playfully.
The Woman Who Eats Soil
What can the unfortunate insect do
if it is found wanting in weight?
A pill-bug rolls into a bead of silent news.
Pins & Needles No. 54: Caroline Cabrera
So the goats are essentially conceived as sacrificial animals.
This Enormous Incomprehensible Sea-Eel
The fish soon realize that human thought dances across the wire, and they seek to destroy it out of fear—humans and fish, after all, share a long history of nets and hooks.
Family: A Fairy Tale
The boy did not know when he ate the seeds that out from his belly button would grow a vine. He decided to show his mother who was busy with his winged sister.
Pins & Needles No. 53: Christopher Citro
Often what may appear bizarre is to me simply the result of describing something as straightforwardly as possible.
The Weeping Woman
In Ancient Greece, it was women’s responsibility to grieve. They lead the prothesis, chanting funeral dirges and pulling at their hair.
The Story of the Moon
Once, night, unchallenged, extended its dark grace
across the sky. To the credit of the town, the stars
at night had been enough, though sometimes
the townspeople went about bumping their heads
in sleep.
