New Book: 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 edited by Kate Berheimer is officially released today. My copy should be arriving by UPS sometime today--I preordered it, of course--being a fan of Bernheimer's previous work.  Needless to say I haven't read this one yet, but I plan to.

Here's the publisher's book description:

The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction

Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling volume-the ultimate literary costume party.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world 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.

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.

And some of the advance praise:

"The fairy tale is not dead. This wonderful collection brings together some of our best contemporary writers and some of our most beloved (and even feared) old stories. Rumplestiltskin, Bluebeard, the Earl-King, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White-all come alive again in vivid and colloquial prose. This is a book of brilliant dreams and dazzling nightmares: perfect fare for imaginative readers of any age."
-Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter and dean of arts and humanities at the University of California, San Diego

"I cannot remember a time I had more fun reading a book! Many of these contemporary tales rival the originals in creepiness, joy, and impact."
-Darcey Steinke, author of Easter Everywhere

"Let's open the door to the green room and peek to see who is waiting. A bevy of beauties . . . an evanescence of sprites . . . an abundance of adversaries . . . a passel of princes . . . Maybe we should have brought that bubbly; but there's something being served here more deeply inebriating than champagne. Hush."
-Gregory Maguire, from the Foreword

And here's the Facebook page for the book.

And it is 608 pages long, so that's a lot of book for the price. Go find you a copy...show the authors and publishers we want more books like this one. :)

 

And if you don't own Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales or Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies) go ahead and order those, too. These will all look pretty on your shelf together after you read them.