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
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.
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.
Oyster
Out of oxygen, algae, and a grain of calcium carbonate, the oyster came to be.
Birthstones
It is November.
I am mining crystal geodes
from the dead
