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
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...
Jacinda Speaks
My fifteenth summer, I poured tears from two earthen pitchers and half the tears fell on dry ground and the other half spilled into the lake where the ripples spread like whispers in empty echo chambers.
‘My Time With the Angels’ and ‘Administrative Assistant’
I climbed the beanstalk, up and up, to the realm
Of pendulous curtains.
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.
‘Mus Maximus’ and ‘Venice’
In Pompeii we didn’t distinguish rats
from mice.
Avenue
The doctor delivers the diagnosis. He tells Gulisa, ‘It could be worse.’
graverobber’s ballad
bifurcating like a heart would/night scatters into pieces/reassembled like a girl should/be I tug the laces/of my boots and hold the shadows
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.
