Kate Bernheimer

The founder of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review collects stories inspired by classic fairy tales and written by top authors, including Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Francine Prose, Kevin Brockmeier, Shelley Jackson, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender and many more. Original.

Forty New Fairy Tales

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

"Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kindof Trojan horse-his cremains in a bullet. Here, in compelling guise, are your favorite mythological figures-Narcissus and Echo, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea, even Argos, Odysseus's faithful dog-alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, and a squid who falls in love with the sun, these are stories of boundless wonder and invention. If "xo" signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbyeto an old way of mythmaking, a book that boldly heralds a new beginning for one of the world's oldest literary traditions"--

Fifty New Myths

XO Orpheus

Collects the thoughts of twenty-four contemporary women writers on the effects of fairy tales on their work, culture, and emotional lives

Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Breaks new ground in fairy-tale studies by offering male writers a chance to reflect on their relationships to fairy tales.

An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

Brothers & Beasts

Chris Sheban

Once popular, an increasingly shabby library book grows lonely until a young girl rediscovers it, but when it becomes lost again, both the book and the girl wonder if they will have a happy ending. By the award-winning author of The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum and the award-winning illustrator of Catching the Moon.

The Lonely Book

Presents a collection of adaptations of fairy tales that focus on such topics as loneliness, alienation, and male domination.

Stories

Horse, Flower, Bird

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods. Like her sisters, who appeared in Bernheimer’s first two novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. Novelist Donna Tartt writes, “Lucy’s particular brand of optimism, blind to its own shadow, is very American—she is innocence holding itself apart so fastidiously that it becomes its opposite.” This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer’s enchanting body of work.

The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

Collects the author's fairy tales that are all a mixture of nonsense, violence, and elegance, including "The Old Dinosaur," "How a Mother Weaned her Girl from Fairy Tales," and "Babes in the Woods."

How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

Children come to visit a little girl who lives all alone inside a castle that is housed inside of a museum.

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a lavishly poetic novel that recounts through folklore and fairy stories the visionary obsessions of a passionate young woman. The narrative moves freely through time and space, uniting Ketzia Gold's early childhood with her sexual awakenings, creating a dreamscape of haunting vividness. Young Ketzia inhabits a storybook world of hallucinatory comedy and terror, surrounded by predatory adults, talking magnolias, and troll-like siblings. Her childhood romance with talented, brilliant Adam Brown flowers briefly into a marriage of tenderness and erotic fervor, but Ketzia cannot escape her own intelligence, and soon finds herself compelled toward intoxicating self-destruction. Bernheimer draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore to shape Ketzia's bewildering adventures. This meeting of nursery rhyme and nightmare transforms everyday objects as childhood photos, wine bottles and metal trinkets take on a life of their own, eluding Ketzia's frightened grasp. Marked by a logical illogic and disarmingly sane madness, this haunting and innovative fable creates an emotional landscape that's as impossible to escape as it is for young Ketzia to inhabit. With an obsessive lyricism recalling the poetic fictions of Carol Maso, Kate Bernheimer interweaves hypnotic imagery and everyday life, moving back and forth through time, piecing together the fragments of memory and imagination. The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold embroiders a visionary realism in the manner of Doris Lessing and Clarice Lispector, making Bernheimer's story a rich tapestry, patterned after childhood longings and the luxuriant complexity of womanhood.

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

stories

Horse, flower, bird

A sequel to The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, the novel follows Merry from her suburban childhood through design school and a whirlwind of lovers, and into a desolate adulthood. Beginning with a toy seal and ending with mushrooms, this fairy tale set in modern times creeps through cruelty and violence to its inevitable end.

The Complete Tales of Merry Gold

Kim Addonizio

Jack Zipes

Francine Prose

Norman Lock

Donna Tartt

Aimee Bender

Joshua Beckman

Matthew Rohrer

Mary Caponegro

Julie Choffel

Monica Fambrough

Sarah Hannah

Brent Hendricks

Stacey Richter

Marjorie Sandor

Kiki Smith

Sarah Veglahn

Wendy Weitman

Contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales on contemporary literature and culture, or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse.

The Blue Issue

Fairy Tale Review

A little girl refuses to brush her hair, but when a team of mice takes up residence in her tangled locks, she faces a tough decision--to brush or not to brush. By the author of the The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

The Girl who Wouldn't Brush Her Hair

Fairy Tale Review is an annual journal devoted to fairy tales, contemporary and historical. Each issue contains poetry, fiction, and essays that either address the abiding influence of fairy tales or are themselves contemporary fairy tales in prose or verse. It is, according to editor Kate Bernheimer, "a venue for all writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales." Contributors to Fairy Tale Review: The Green Issue include: Brian Baldi, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Jedediah Berry, Paula Bohince, Wendy Brenner, Ayse Papatya Bucak, Rikki Ducornet, Johannes Goransson, Ann Jaderlund, Dan.

The Green Issue

Fairy Tale Review, The Green Issue

Jake Parker

¿Qué ocurre cuando una niña se niega a cepillarse su larga y bonita melena? Bueno, pues que un buen día aparece un lindo ratoncito y se instala dentro. Y después llega otro.... Y otro... Y OTRO... ¡Madre mía! Entonces sucede que la hermosa mata de pelo de la ni

La nia que no queria cepillarse el cabello / The Girl Who Wouldn't Brush Her Hair

Laird Hunt

Edward Hopper’s painting "Office at Night" is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on “the facts” of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.

Kate Bernheimer

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