Fairy Tale Review Archive
Once upon a time …
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
May 25, 2025
New appearances in Best American Short Stories, the 2024 Lambda Awards, and beyond; a goodbye to Benjamin Schaefer; a celebration of Poetry Editor Jon Riccio’s new chapbook.
The Rainbow Issue Editor’s Note | Benjamin Schaefer
At the height of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was asked to speak at an informal recovery meeting by a friend I had met ten years...
If you were red riding hood | Hannah Grieco
and I found you, sniffed you out on the path with your basket, your cape, your soft hair, your pink-orange freckles lit by the sun piercing the...
The Magic Bangle | Shastri Akella
Kartik makes a decision the day his father strikes him: on workday evenings and weekends he’ll pretend he’s a tourist in his hometown. His real...
Submission Call | Vol. 20
Founding Editor Kate Bernheimer will edit the twentieth annual issue of Fairy Tale Review. Vol. 20 will not have a theme. We are looking for your...
2022 Pushcart Prize Nominees
As we come to the end of 2022, we’re pleased to announce our Pushcart Prize nominations from The Lilac Issue. They are:
Submission Call | The Rainbow Issue
“We gays cast our nets out into the mythic sea, searching for our own lost archetypes…those symbols of the human psyche which we may claim as...
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,...
Sibyl | Kegan Swyers
i decayed to a voice a vowel a stressed syllable. trapped in the glass of my childhood jar. i used to stab stars in the top. insects crawled on the...
The First Time that the Trees Began to Walk | Wendy Dinwiddie
The first time that the trees began to walk, Mae wore pink onesies and couldn’t yet talk. She lived with her mother at the end of the road, and they...
Two Poems | Karthik Sethuraman
man in the land of Uz you don’t know the first thing about a crow where to trace its roots when to call the doctor in the summer what words...
Because A Sharp Girl Must Be A Changeling
And the men say put her over
the fire just to see, and the women
say bake her a cake in a thimble,
just to see
"Queen of Hearts" and "Libra Season"
Everyone
has a story about human greed and a flood. The Queen
licks the blood from her blade.
