My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales Review

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(More customer reviews)I'd been eagerly awaiting this book's publication for months, and my expectations have been greatly exceeded. These are fairy tales for grown-ups...or, I should say grown-up children. The authors and stories are diverse; there is no consistent literary style. As the editor writes: "The goal was to bring together a variety of writers...whose work had suggested 'fairy tales' to me."
Here are the writers and the fairy tales each used as inspiration:
Joy Williams, Baba Yaga
Jonathon Keats, The Snow Maiden
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Ivan Tsaevich
Alissa Nutting, The Juniper Tree
Francine Pose, Hansel and Gretel
Kevin Brockmeie, Rumpelstiltskin
Neil LaBute, Rumpelstilstskin
Shelley Jackson, The Six Swans
Joyelle McSweeney, The Bremen Town Musicians
Lydia Millet, Snow White and Rose Red
Saah Shun-Lien Bynum, The Erlking
Brian Evenson, Dapplegrim
Michael Cunningham, The Wild Swans
Kaen Joy Fowler, The Wild Swans
Rikki Ducornet, The Little Match Gil
Timothy Schaffert, The Little Mermaid
Katherine Vaz, The Little Mermaid
Karen Bennan, The Snow Queen
Lucy Corin, The Tinder Box
Ilya Kaminsky, The Teapot
Michael Martone, Jack and the Beanstalk
Kelly Link, Catskin
Chris Adrian, Teague O'Kane and the Corpse
Jim Shepard, Jump Into My Sack
Kathryn Davis, Body Without Soul
Kellie Wells, The Story of Grandmother
Sabrina Orah Mark, The Young Slave
Aimee Bender, Donkeyskin
Marjorie Sandor, The White Cat
Joyce Carol Oates, Bluebeard
John Updike, Bluebead
Rabih Alameddine, Sleeping Beauty
Stacy Richter, Cinderella
Neil Gaiman, The Odyssey
Francesca Lia Block, Cupid and Psyche
Lily Hoang, The Story of the Mosquito
Noako Awa, A Kamikakushi Tale
Hiomi Ito, Sansho the Steward
Michael Mejia, Tales from Jalisco
Kim Addonizio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Kate Bernheimer, The Oval Portrait
Don't expect the stories to stick too closely to the source material. But do expect to find some new favorite writers.
If I could have bought only one book this year, it would be collection.

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The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction 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.

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