Kate Bernheimer assembles a collection of chiefly new stories, all that draw directly or indirectly on a traditional fairy tale. We see in the table of contents the inspiration for each story. It took me over two months to read it, and now I'm a bit sad to be done. Heck, I may reread all the ones that earned an A from me.



The collection offers an array of approaches: some offer short tales of two pages or so, some write for 20+ pages. Some tales are quite like fairy tales in that the characters

Kate Bernheimer assembles a collection of chiefly new stories, all that draw directly or indirectly on a traditional fairy tale. We see in the table of contents the inspiration for each story. It took me over two months to read it, and now I'm a bit sad to be done. Heck, I may reread all the ones that earned an A from me.



The collection offers an array of approaches: some offer short tales of two pages or so, some write for 20+ pages. Some tales are quite like fairy tales in that the characters are somewhat flat and their fate delivers a clear moral. Others complicate their characters with mixed motives and layers of intention, which muddy them to the point where they mimic mere mortals you'd meet in line at the post office. These are the tales that I like the best, whether they are set in a modern context or left in a castle, a forest or a seaside evocative of an old tale. Some are quite experimental in form (which I dislike). I really prefer character-driven stories over those that get into a cerebral space when the author is tinkering a great deal with form.



Here are my notes on the stories I've read with letter grades showing my degree of affection. NOTE: Some of my comments contain mild spoilers, more by revealing theme than by revealing plot. But read at your own risk.



(B+) Joy Williams' "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" moves a Russian tale to the Florida marshlands and depict a horrifying conflict between nature and science.



(B) Jonathan Keats' "Ardour" keeps things traditional by retelling "The Snow Maiden," but he switches up the ending so that I had to think about the implications for mother nature and human nature.



(B) Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "I'm Here" mixes up a couple of old tales when she depicts an older woman confronting change and decay. Think of "Trip to Bountiful" with a fairy tale twist. Because I am a new gerontology student and nearing 50, I liked the themes/ images/ characters in this one.



(B) Alissa Nutting's "The Brother and the Bird" provides the book's title with her story of family dysfunction forged with the same magic and horror of Grimm's "The Juniper Tree" fairy tales.



(A) Francine Prose's "Hansel and Gretel" has only faint connections with the source tale. On its own, this story does a great job tracing a new bride's horror at slowly realizing that her husband is not collaborating with her against a manacing, mature artist (a crone, here a symbol of chaos, decay and destitution). Instead he is conspiring with the crone to rob his bride of her expectations that marriage will bring her order, security, and abundance. But it's more subtley told than this. It's a contemporary coming-of-age tale with strong fairy tale allusions.



(D) Kevin Brockmeier's "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin" was very experimental, and I didn't finish it. I felt as though the author was spending more time demonstrating how clever he is and not enough timing meeting the readers' needs.



(C) Neil LaBute's "With Hair of Hand-spun Gold" reminds me of his play Medea Redux, but this time the genders are switched, and the student is a little man who has Rumplestiltskin qualities. It's like other LeBute works in the way it shows great manipulation and coldness in human relationships. Eerie.



(B) Shelley Jackson's "The Swan Brothers" sets her story in an art gallery. She actually does experiment with form by employing post-modern techniques of multiple versions within one work. I wanted to dislike it, but I found myself hypnotized by the merry-go-round of recurring themes, images, and characters. They contort with each passing in ways that made me consider the significance of what changed and what stayed the same. Being familiar with the source tale helped me stick with it.



(D) Joyelle McSweeney's "The Warm Mouth" retells the Bremen Town Musicians, but she personifies a bunch of modern items and people (well, a corpse) found in a skid row setting, and my mind and heart couldn't connect, even though my eye passed over every word of her story.



(A) Lydia Millet's "Snow White, Rose Red" actually reminded me more of a modern, fractured version of "The Three Bears" more than it did of the source tale of the same name as her story. Set in the wood in a vacation home of an ultra-rich family, an outsider sets in motion a number of dramatic changes, and we are left to ask questions about who is good/evil and if the changes were good/evil.



(B+) Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's "The Erlking" writes a Stephen-King like horror story about the inability parents have to protect their kids from dark forces. Set at a school fair in contemporary times, the building tension makes it easy for readers to imagine their child falling prey to such seduction.



(C) Brian Evenson's "Dapplegrim" retains the allegorical nature of many old tales. It's filled with the grisly detail Evenson often employs.



(B+) Michael Cunningham's "The Wild Swan" is a very brief retelling that drops the brothers into a modern setting. But in a short space, he made me compassionate towards the social outcasts of our day by casting them as disfigured royals. There's truth to that, I believe.



(A) Karen Joy Fowler "The Halfway People" has an old tale feel, but she fleshes out her protagonist quite nicely, and she depicts several people caught between two worlds, between two states of being. I think she taps into the feeling many experience, "I'm a misfit." However, she helps some of them find a way to accept this and move on or settle in. A useful fiction.



(C-) Rikki Ducornet's "Green Air" plays with images from "The Little Match Girl" in a way that is dark and bizarre. I didn't like it.



(B+) Timothy Schaffert's "The Mermaid in the Tree" creates a somewhat sci-fi fantasy setting for HC Anderson's tale. The author claims she's focusing on the woman who gets the prince after the mermaid is rejected, but she's lying. This version focuses on the prince. I was captivated by the way the prince's passion and pain transforms him.



(A) Katherine Vaz' "What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body Is Gone" is a marvelous retelling of "The Little Mermaid." Here we meet Meredith, married to Ray and disovering herself unable to articulate her love for him. The tale grows complex and poignant. She gets into the pain and complexities of long-term relationships going sour. She has some fantastical images, but her characterization is quite realistic.



(B+) Karen Brennan's "The Snow Queen" portays an older woman, questing through the cityscape, trying to find her drug addicted son -- and herself. It borrows themes and images from the fairytale, but it can pass as a contemporary tale.



(B) Lucy Corin's "Eyes of Dogs" offers a cautionary tale to young men who pursue wealth and fame without paying homage to older, feminine forces. I kept thinking of Pushkin's short story "Queen of Spades" while reading this.



(C) Ilya Kaminsky's "Little Pot" sets the original in a food-scarce Russian setting.



(D) Michael Martone's "A Bucket of Warm Spit" employs a staccatto-style to tell a story about . . . something. About a famine? A praire? A boy named Jack? It was very hard to read.



(B+) Kelly Link's "Catskin" was a mesmerizing tale of a witch, her children, and the cats that they are or were or would soon become. It was wacky, but the tension among the characters rang true even amid the fantastical details.



(B) Chris Adrian's "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" sets an old trope in a cityscape with hand-held electronics, showing us that death still holds sway in the digital age.



(B+) Jim Shephard's "Pleasure Boating on Lituya Bay" employs some very strong images that magnify the conflict in the main character's marriage. Set in Alaska, this story shows what mischief can happen when a man meets a maiden, fortune and death on the road, except this is all metaphorical in the modern tale.



(A) Kathryn Davis' "Body-without-Soul" plays with time, but in a way that doesn't distort character, plot or image too far. It shimmers in a way that haunted me for a long time. Lovely!



(C) Kellie Wells' "The Girl, the Wolf, The Crone" takes the elements of "Little Red Riding Hood" and pushes them through a salad shooter. It was experimental and interesting on that level. I wanted to like it because the original is the fairytale that most resonated with me when I was a child, but it was just way too contorted for me. Maybe if she had messed with the original 20% and not 80% I would have bought it.



(B+) Sabrina Orah Mark's "My Brother Gary Made a Move and This Is What Happened" is short, sweet and just a bit wacked. Bonus points to Marks for working a second fairytale into the comments section.



(A) Aimee Bender's "The Color Master" takes an unnamed character from Perrault's "Donkeyskin" and creates a new tale. The three dresses in Donkeyskin get much attention in the original, but Bender fleshes out the artist who creates these dresses. At once magical and believable. WTG, Aimee.



(B) Marjorie Sandor's "The White Cat" does a great job in just a few paragraphs in depicting the power, perversity and persuasiveness of longing. And I'm not just saying that because the alliteration compelled me.



(B+) Joyce Carol Oates' "Blue-bearded Lover" imagines a bride who outwits Blue beard. I can't decide if she's clever or just conquered in a different way. A thought-provoking take on the battle of the sexes.



(B+) John Updike's "Bluebeard in Ireland" imagines the doomed bride in Ireland. Told from the point of view of her older, thrice-married husband, Updike chronicles the bickering, cut-throat compromises and other cheery elements of modern relationships typical of his style /themes.



(B-) Rabih Alameddine's "A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper" offers a grotesque and gritty allegory of sterility and funcundity, based on Sleeping Beauty.



(B) Stacey Richter's "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility" satirizes a set of academic papers she found that scholars wrote in observation of drug addicts. Here, Cinderella goes psychodelic, but it's the staff and scholars--and not the patients--who prove to be most fascinating characters because of their reactions.



(B-) Neil Gaman's "Orange" was more science fiction than fairttale for me, and I couldn't see the connection to the Odyssey. Maybe I need to reread Homer and look for sun imagery.



(B+) Francesca Lia Block's "Psyche's Dark Night" places Psyche and Cupid in a modern setting, depicting the emotional wasteland of late adult urban dating.



(A) Lily Hoang's "The Story of the Misquito" is a retelling of a Vietnamese tale that the author can't confirm with a source text, which makes it all the richer because it's entangled in her own memories. It's a myth about the origin of the misquito and a cautionary tale about one of the many ways marriage can go wrong.



(B) Noako Awa's "First Day of Snow" is a short tale about a child being drawn into the woods by a supernatural bunny. It draws on several themes and images from traditional tales, so says the author in the afterward.



(B-) Hiromi Ito's "I am Anjuhimeko" takes a traditional tale of lost siblings and conveys several incarnations. I need to reread this with more patience. I found it too detailed and too long, so I resorted to skimming the back half.



(B-) Michael Mejia's "Coyote Takes Us Home" is a tale that relies heavily on images. It's nearly a verbal collage. It conveys the struggles of border people, using some elements of coyote tales to connect them, but also playing on the concept of "coyote" as a smuggler of illegals. Heartbreaking and gritty, real and unreal. My low "grade" is probably due more to my recoiling from the horror of the topic than a harsh judgement of the challenging style.



(B) Kim Addonizio's "Ever After" imagines the seven dwarves in a contemporary setting. Inspired by a partial text of Snow White, they struggle while waiting to see whether or not this woman of their dreams will arrive.



(B) Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework" transforms a tale by Poe but keeps the same mood. The narrator describes a visit to a cottage that has a number of ornate features, which leads the narrator to the work of decoding the features, analyzing the visit and examining the nature of perception.