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
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.
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.
No Girls Allowed
A blue-painted drawbridge. A frog pond moat. A two-story clubhouse on its own island deep in the vine-strangled woods, six bear cubs peering out from the wooden slats of windows and a lone green door.
(re)peat
The spears, the spires I aspired to be as reaching because what
did you know about tapers.
