Fairy Tale Review (review)

The debut issue of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review is “devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for all writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales.” If “The Blue Issue” is representative of the annual volumes to come, those of us who are interested in how fairy tales continue to insert and assert themselves in contemporary cultural production have something to look forward to.

The editor, Kate Bernheimer, author and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Alabama, is perhaps best known in fairy-tale scholarship for her book Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales. She remarks in her concluding “Editor’s Note” that she is particularly drawn to “that strange quality that [Max] Lüthi identifies as ‘firm form,’ as sparse, flat and depthless as it is wild, weightless and bright” (103). Strangely, in light of this comment, the stories and poems in this collection, while occasionally sparse, are not “flat and depthless.” They tend to be more contained and controlled; in terms of themes and imagery, rather weighty than weightless; and most, though not all, are more bleak than “bright.”

The volume itself is very pretty. The sky-blue cover and the issue title, “The Blue Issue,” satisfyingly recall Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books, and the cover illustration by Kiki Smith announces the journal’s purpose and hints at the content with the image of Little Red Riding Hood and Grandmother emerging from the belly of the wolf. The Web site also provides glipses of what is to be found within: the cover illustration and five of the pieces that appear in the text can be found at < http://www.fairytalereview.com >.

It has been pointed out in the review section of Marvels & Tales that fairy-tale revisions seem to be a flourishing industry. The poems and stories in Fairy Tale Review are not retellings of fairy tales from different perspectives or “contemporized” versions and revisions of classic fairy tales as we have become used to with the work of Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue, or the fairy-tale series edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling in the early 1990s. Rather, these pieces engage more or less overtly with particular tales and/or themes, images and symbols that are typical of fairy tales.

The stories in the first part of the book tend toward the bleak and gritty, especially the first story, “Ever After,” by Kim Addonizio. It tells of seven urban dwarves who have assigned themselves names from Disney’s Snow White: Dopey, for example, is a drugged-out panhandler. Many of the men work at an Oz-themed restaurant where they are presented to patrons as munchkin servers and busboys. Living together in a crowded fifth-floor walk-up, they wait, not for Prince Charming, but for Snow White herself to show up and save them from a heartless world and from themselves.

Beginning the volume with this piece gives the reader a sense that the work in the volume will be of the urban, ironic, super-contemporary type of fairy-tale revision made most familiar through the work of writers such as Francesca Lia Block. This is certainly not the case throughout the journal. Only one other piece is “urban.” The whimsical “A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure and Risk-Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility,” by Stacey Richter, is one of the few stories that is primarily comic and is the only one that contains a sense of glee. The juxtaposition of the objective language of the medical report with fairy-tale characterization—a “Princess” on crystal (methamphetamine), a false hero doctor, and a biker-gang evil “Prince”—produces a surface of lightness and whimsy, but allows for the darker undertones of the problems of drug addiction and violence against women. The humor and lightness of “Emergency Room” skims the dark surfaces of these themes without ever trivializing them, a task not often...