Fairy Tale Review Press
- Fairy Tale Review Press
Over the past seven years, as founder and editor of Fairy Tale Review, I have seen the passionate interest fairy tales hold for the thousands of writers who submit to every issue. I founded the journal out of a sense that literary works based on fairy tales, like the lonely heroes of fairy tales themselves, lacked homes. I was immediately flooded with very good manuscripts. Many hopeful correspondents are well-known authors whose magical works have been turned down by older literary publications; others are true believers, and have devoted their lives to folklore in unusual ways—creating fairy-tale newspapers, selling homemade fairy-tale wares, producing freely distributed fairy-tale comics; still others are grandfathers, mothers, teachers, biologists, or students, who as new writers feel comfortable trying on the fairy-tale form. I am touched by every submission; each shines with love for fairy tales.
Readers love fairy tales. Even the most virulent critics of fairy tales can't look away. With their false brides, severed limbs, and talking donkeys, they are hypnotic. "All great novels are great fairy tales," wrote Vladimir Nabokov. I would argue that all great stories are great fairy tales...whatever their shape (novel, novella, short story, poem).
The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog—undervalued and undermined—even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading. This book can help us move forward as readers in a moment of insecurity about the future of books.
I publish one issue of Fairy Tale Review every year, and occasional books that feel fairy-tale like. One of Fairy Tale Review Press's most successful books, Joy Williams's The Changeling, is a reprint edition of a book that was first published, and reviled by critics, in 1978. It's a spectacular, terrifying novel, and it's been on the Small Press Distribution bestseller list in fiction since coming out in 2008 with a foreword by Rick Moody. When Joy's novel [End Page 8] was published, one critic complained that the novel was emblematic of everything wrong with the avant-garde, basically; if you look at the novel closely, it's clearly a very traditional book: if you consider that the form of the tale is one of literature's oldest formal examples. With the new rise of fabulism among writers, this book clearly was ahead of its time—as fairy tales always are, and always will be.
I am constantly astounded by the literary innovations so bound to the form. It is an honor and pleasure to work in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, and so many others who devoted their creative and scholarly lives to the celebration of this magical tradition. I could not imagine myself as a fairy-tale writer without the mirror-role of my fairy-tale editorships. It is to work in service of the humble and the overlooked—these domestic and miniature myths, these examples of what Gilles Deleuze calls minoritarian art. Long associated with women, children, the nursery, and rejected beasts, and thus often dismissed by grown-ups afraid to seem weak or uncool, fairy tales are heroic, surviving against the odds.
As C. S. Lewis famously said, "Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." I think we're quite old enough now.
Kate Bernheimer is the author of three novels and the story collection Horse, Flower, Bird (2010). Her third edited collection, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, is forthcoming (2010). She teaches at the University of Louisiana.
