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

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 Color 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 talesthe 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 Andersens The Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl to Charles Perraults Bluebeard and Cinderella to the Brothers Grimms 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.