Fairy Tale Review

SUBMISSIONS OPEN

2011-05-02T12:28:00.001-05:00

Call for Submissions
Fairy Tale Review (The Grey Issue)
Themed Issue on Lost Girls & Boys

SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN UNTIL CLOSED. OPEN AS OF February 1, 2011. STILL OPEN as of today, May 1, 2011. OPEN until closed. Simultaneous submissions welcome. See below for more details.

We are currently accepting submissions for the eighth annual issue of Fairy Tale Review, The Grey Issue, to be Guest Edited by Alissa Nutting. This is a themed issue, dedicated to Lost Girls & Boys.

We’re interested in writing that visits and turns on tropes of children and young adults, girls and boys, becoming lost (whether figuratively or literally) in fairy tales and in the contemporary literature that reinterprets or is informed by fairy tales. This includes characters who are separated from parents, who are stuck inside an animal’s stomach, who are faced with bewildering choices, who are running away to or from who-knows-where, who are confused in the forest—lost in any sense, and in any form of writing. Please send poetry, fiction, essays, drama, creative nonfiction, comics, illustration, etc.

The submission period is open until we announce it is closed sometime in spring. We will consider only previously unpublished work and new translations. Please submit work to thegreyissue@gmail.com as word, .doc, .rtf, or .pdf files. Artwork must be in high-resolution (300 dpi or higher) to be considered. The Grey Issue will be published in 2012. All submissions will be responded to within four months of receipt. Simultaneous submissions absolutely accepted; simply let us know as soon as your work under consideration by us is taken elsewhere.

Questions can be directed to thegreyissue@gmail.com

Curious about what we publish? The web edition of The Red Issue is online. Also, the first issue of Fairy Tale Review, The Blue Issue, is available as a free PDF download. Print back issues of Fairy Tale Review are sold out, though some are for sale here albeit at astronomical prices. We hope to have some more copies of The Red Issue delivered to Small Press Distribution, and Weightless Books always has all issues as e-books on hand!

Letter from Guest Editor Timothy Schaffert

2011-01-31T19:44:00.005-06:00

I approached The Brown Issue meditating on the drab suggestion of the hue assigned to me by Fairy Tale Review’s founder and editor Kate Bernheimer. Less vibrant than red, the motif of the previous issue dedicated to Little Red Riding Hood, the color brown suggests something weary. What would I do with that? It was a quietly interesting challenge and I wondered if Kate had played a fairy-tale trick on me somehow.

I had no theme in mind as I began reading the submissions, but one did begin to take shape, as if the authors themselves felt inspired by the autumnal, the aged, the decaying. And I realized that brown is at the heart of many fairy tale props and conveyors of plot and poetry—gingerbread walls, fallen leaves, loaves of bread. Wolves, horses, hedgehogs, rabbits. The boards of cradles and coffins.

For this, the lucky seventh issue of Fairy Tale Review, I accepted pieces I loved, but also rejected pieces I loved; and I rejected any number that were publishable. I felt guilty taking such pleasure in reading so much fine work that I knew I’d nonetheless have to send back to the authors; yet, in a perverse way, this also was good, a reminder to all of us that fairy tales absolutely flourish today.

I enjoyed noting various shared impulses among the writers submitting work: prominent among them, in addition to motifs of brown, was glass. There were children of glass, houses of glass, horses of glass. Perhaps all of that is a reflection of these fragile times? (Glass, of course, is one of the most traditional of fairy-tale motifs; see A. S. Byatt’s wonderful essay, “Ice, Snow, and Glass” for a discussion.)

In discussing all the glass, Kate and I decided that a future issue will indeed be The Glass Issue. Which reminds me to let you know that Fairy Tale Review’s reading period is open again: please see guidelines below. (These will eventually be on the website.) Please spread the word.

My many thanks to all who submitted work for The Brown Issue of Fairy Tale Review. It is now in the early stages of production and forthcoming later this year. And thanks especially to Kate Bernheimer for allowing me to take part in her important literary project.

--Timothy Schaffert

Please repost and distribute:

Call for Submissions
Fairy Tale Review (The Grey Issue)
Themed Issue on Lost Girls & Boys

We are currently accepting submissions for the eighth annual issue of Fairy Tale Review, The Grey Issue, to be Guest Edited by Alissa Nutting. This is a themed issue, dedicated to Lost Girls & Boys.

We’re interested in writing that visits and turns on tropes of children and young adults, girls and boys, becoming lost (whether figuratively or literally) in fairy tales and in the contemporary literature that reinterprets or is informed by fairy tales. This includes characters who are separated from parents, who are stuck inside an animal’s stomach, who are faced with bewildering choices, who are running away to or from who-knows-where, who are confused in the forest—lost in any sense, and in any form of writing. Please send poetry, fiction, essays, drama, creative nonfiction, comics, illustration, etc.

The submission period is open until we announce it is closed sometime in spring. We will consider only previously unpublished work and new translations. Please submit work to thegreyissue@gmail.com as word, .doc, .rtf, or .pdf files. Artwork must be in high-resolution (300 dpi or higher) to be considered. The Grey Issue will be published in 2012. All submissions will be responded to within four months of receipt. Simultaneous submissions absolutely accepted; simply let us know as soon as your work under consideration by us is taken elsewhere.

Questions can be directed to thegreyissue@gmail.com

Curious about what we publish? The web edition of The Red Issue is online. Also, the first issue of Fairy Tale Review, The Blue Issue, is available as a free PDF download. Print back issues of Fairy Tale Review are sold out, though some are for sale here albeit at astronomical prices. We hope to have some more copies of The Red Issue delivered to Small Press Distribution, and Weightless Books always has all issues as e-books on hand!

Sold Out

2010-11-29T21:19:00.003-06:00

Hard to believe the day has come, but copies of back issues of Fairy Tale Review are now sold out. The current issue (The Red Issue) is still available from our friends at Small Press Distribution. FTR Press books are also all available from Small Press Distribution as always! We also are delighted to have some copies left for sale there of "Songs for Fairy Tales."

Ebook versions of Fairy Tale Review titles are all available from the marvelous Weightless Books. If you are interested in teaching Fairy Tale Review, we hear that ebooks work well for students, and we've priced them extremely affordably.

The Blue Issue is always available to you as a free download on our website which is being updated to reflect back issues now being SOLD OUT.

For those of you who do have all back issues to date--The Blue Issue (2005), The Green Issue (2006), The Violet Issue (2007), The White Issue (2008) and The Aquamarine Issue (2009)--we thank you for your dedication! You have the set!

Oh, and does anyone know why there is a copy of The Aquamarine Issue for sale on Amazon for nearly $150?

NPR/Weekend Edition and Fairy Tales

2010-11-16T21:03:00.000-06:00

Lynn Neary speaks to writers Kate Bernheimer and Neil LaBute about fairy tales.

The Changeling by Joy Williams

2010-11-16T20:31:00.003-06:00

We are delighted to announce that you can now read Fairy Tale Review Press's 30th Anniversary Edition of The Changeling by Joy Williams as an ebook, thanks to our dear friends at Weightless Books. This book never should have have gone out of print in the first place; it's a 20th century classic. Bewildering, mythic, and new. Such an honor to bring it into the darkly glittering world once again in new form. From Rick Moody's foreword to the anniversary edition:

The Changeling, which is rich with the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published about the same time), and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano, would have seemed perfectly legible in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow was published, or Gaddis’s J.R. But the late seventies, with their punk rock nihilism and their Studio 54 fatuousness, were perhaps not properly situated to understand this variety of Joy Williams challenge. To their shame.

Thirty years later, the situation looks quite different. Felicitously so. The Joy Williams who went on to write the astonishing short stories of Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest, and such marvels of realistic other-worldliness as her recent novel The Quick and the Dead (2002), has instructed us, as the most original writers must, as to the consumption of her graceful arabesques. The tectonic movement of her paragraphs and her narratives no longer looks impulsive, if indeed it ever did. Now it looks exactly like originality.

Petition to the National Book Foundation

2010-10-29T17:06:00.004-05:00

OCTOBER 24, 2010

Petition to the National Book Foundation: Maria Tatar and Kate Bernheimer Are on a Mission

To the National Book Foundation,

We write as strong supporters of all that the National Book Foundation does for American letters. But we are also puzzled about one point in the eligibility guidelines for the prestigious National Book Award. Currently the Foundation’s website states that “collections and/or retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales are not eligible,” an exclusion that applies to the categories of both Fiction (for adults) and Young People’s Literature. Yet this body of literature is arguably one of the greatest literary influences on a vast number of contemporary American writers. Might the National Book Foundation reconsider this point in its guidelines?

Under the guidelines as stated above, John Updike’s 1964 National Book Award winner, the novel Centaur, would actually have been ineligible as it retells multiple classical myths. There are other examples of retellings among the wonderful books you have honored. In fact, we believe that the National Book Foundation already recognizes and embraces the literary value of retellings. Removing the exclusion would simply more accurately represent the Foundation’s actual practice, which represents a welcome appreciation of this iconic literary art form. Also, it seems that the National Book Foundation intends to welcome formal diversity; as such, there is no exclusion for “retellings of the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays.”

In changing its guidelines the National Book Foundation will take the opportunity to help preserve the enduring tradition of fairy tales for future generations of readers. While scholars cannot always trace fairy tales to single sources, new versions of these magical narratives are indeed literary works in their own right. In turn these newer versions help bring attention to a very old and diverse body of work, now fading from view. To acknowledge the value of fairy tales, folk tales and myths as they are appropriated, adapted, revised, fractured, and retold seems in line with the National Book Foundation’s overall mission.

In sum, we would be delighted to see the National Book Foundation change its National Book Award guidelines to allow retellings of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths. We would be glad to consult with you more on this matter, and truly appreciate your consideration of this request. We look forward to hearing from you with your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Maria Tatar
John L. Loeb Professor of Folklore, Mythology, and Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University
Author, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm

Kate Bernheimer
Writer in Residence & Associate Professor, University of Louisiana in Lafayette
Author, Horse, Flower, Bird; editor, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales; and founder and editor, Fairy Tale Review

A few ways to join in the cause: ‘like’ the Facebook page; leave a comment here saying you support the petition; or reach us directly by writing to fairytaleappeal [at] gmail.com

How Nazis Used Fairy Tales

2010-04-20T08:24:00.007-05:00

Interesting article from the Telegraph on how Nazis "injected" re-fashioned fairy tales with propaganda. The result? Little Red Riding Hood's cloak bares a swastika, and Snow White's father wants to invade Poland.

Fairy-Tale Book Repository

2009-10-14T00:43:00.001-05:00

Fairy Tale Review announces its newest program, a Fairy-Tale Book Repository. We seek to collect as many fairy-tale books as possible, books known and unknown, for children or for adults, from around the world. In the project's early stages, please watch the blog for an ongoing list of books received.

Fairy Tale Review believes that fairy-tale books, representing one of our oldest and most priceless literary traditions, are at risk of disappearing--overshadowed by new and commercialized volumes, or simply for lack of care. We often find rare, beautifully illustrated volumes discarded and left to mold in boxes in the far back of antique shops in our travels, and would like to dust them off and put them on the Fairy-Tale Book Repository shelves in Louisiana, as a first step. A long-range plan is in progress.

New or old collections of fairy tales (or books based on fairy tales) are welcome. With each book, please send a very short letter telling the story of how you received or found the book. Please keep your eye out for fairy-tale collections when you travel.

Books for the Fairy-Tale Book Repository may be sent to:

Kate Bernheimer
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Louisiana
P.O. Box 44691
Lafayette LA 70504

Fairy Tale Review Congratulates Lily Hoang

2009-09-02T17:37:00.003-05:00

Fairy Tale Review congratulates Lily Hoang, author of Changing, which has just received a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award.

Review of The Violet Issue

2009-08-24T15:57:00.002-05:00

From a review in Marvels & Tales: The Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.

"This issue presents an exceptionally interesting collection of writing inspired by fairy tales. In a period saturated with popular retellings of fairy tales, from Walt Disney’s animation to Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, it is refreshing to read a self-consciously literary collection, reminding us that the popular may also be artful. The fairy tale’s remarkable vitality as a form and as an aesthetic is demonstrated not just in the range this collection presents, but also in the pleasure it evokes."

--K. Elizabeth Spillman

University of Pennsylvania

(You can access the whole article if you can access Project Muse.)

Interview with Fairy Tale Review Founder & Editor

2009-05-06T09:50:00.003-05:00

FC2's new podcast is an interview with Fairy Tale Review editor Kate Bernheimer. To hear more about contemporary fairy tales as an innovative art form, check it out here. FC2 is an independent, non-profit literary press; they published Bernheimer's first two novels, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold and The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold. You can find more out about FC2 here.

Interview with Joy Williams by bookslut.com

2008-10-22T17:23:00.002-05:00

Interview with Joy Williams (PDF)

Joy Williams to be Inducted into The American Academy of Arts & Letters

2008-04-23T10:41:00.002-05:00

Joy Williams, whose novel The Changeling is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review Press in May, will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters that very month. Congratulations, Joy.

The Changeling

2008-04-21T19:05:00.005-05:00

A post by Dwight Garner on the New York Times book blog about The Changeling's sad fate in 1978, and its triumphant reissue this May, at the above link . . . !

Contributor Kellie Wells Interviewed in The Kalamazoo Gazette

2008-03-16T21:15:00.005-05:00

Here's a wonderful interview about fairy tales and writing with Kellie Wells, whose story "Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come" will appear in Fairy Tale Review (The White Issue) in December 2008. It's based on The Pied Piper, and will appear with a photograph we're just crazy about . . . who knew rabbits could be so big? Wells usually teaches fiction at Washington University in St. Louis to some of the luckiest writers on earth, but this semester she is a visiting professor at Western Michigan University.