My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Published by Penguin Books
Paperback
Published 28 September 2010
576 pages
Owned

Find out more about the book Buy the book: UK (affiliate's link) Buy the book: USA I read this for 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge. The category is 'a book with multiple authors'. WHAT'S IT'S ABOUT The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Neil Gaiman, "Orange"

Aimee Bender, "The Colour Master"

Joyce Carol Oates, "Blue-bearded Lover"

Michael Cunningham, "The Wild Swans"

These and more than thirty other stories by Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, and many other extraordinary writers make up this thrilling celebration of fairy tales-the ultimate literary costume party.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico.

Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

EXTRACT

BABA IAGA HAD A DAUGHTER, A PELICAN CHILD (Baba Iaga and The Pelican Child by Joy Williams)

WHAT I THOUGHT

I really enjoyed My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. It's a great, diverse collection of stories. I love fairy tales, especially darker ones intended for adults. Some of my favourite stories are the adult fairy tales edited by Ellen Datlow. I loved the cover and this is one of the reasons I bought the book. That and the crazy title. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me contains a good mix of stories and there's something for everyone. I loved how some stories pretty closely resembled the original fairy tale and how some were unrecognisable. Among my favourites were Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child by Joy Williams, Snow White, Rose Red by Lydia Millet, The Wild Swans by Michael Cunningham, A Bucket of Warm Spit by Michael Martone and Blue-Bearded Lover by Joyce Carol Oates.

RATING

Published