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
‘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
‘A Mouth And Its Name’ & ‘The Hour After Stars’
You told me north water
was not built by virga
but from suicide of the moon.
‘Baby Bird’ & ‘The Barren Wife Gives Birth to a Girl’
I will do the nursing. The suckling and swallowing. He will do the singing.
Spirit Medium
Now that my pen is made of glass
I pray to write of this loud tree
and not simply fashion
Magenta
Once lived a woman wrapped in a magenta skin so brilliant she glowed, but the story doesn’t start like that.
Three Poems
Even if he was a bull angel,
a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber,
a horned prevaricator,
it took dirty tricks to get him.
The Seed and The Stone
The Arbor tells us stories of a time before, when all the dead were kept in orchards that rolled endlessly, and had always been there, and people tended to them constantly in gratitude and respect for their ancestors.
a disappearance beside the yatsushiro sea
Margaret Morri was the name Yoshikane Araki used when referring to an apparition who squeezed under the doorway or window mesh or rose between barrack floorboards to haunt the hot desert air above his straw mattress.
‘Covenant I’ & ‘Daphne’
the organ harvest is most/ delectable beneath fluorescent light/ rebelling against the heaving stars/
Sleeping Beauty’s Daughter
The day her husband died, Sleeping Beauty gave back to him the kiss he had bestowed upon her consentless lips sixty years before.
The Winners of the 2018 Flash Fairy Tale Contest
On February 26, 2018, we asked our Twitter followers to tell us the biggest and most beautiful stories they could within Twitter’s longer, and more storytelling-friendly 280-character limit.
Terrarium
I’ve made the pitcher on my table human again.
Her elegant white neck, belly slightly bloated
with flowers.
Call for Submissions: The Pink Issue
We’re pleased to announce our fifteenth issue, The Pink Issue, which will be published in early 2019.
