HOW A MOTHER WEANED HER GIRL FROM FAIRY TALES
Stories
Elegantly simple fairy tales of strangeness and wonder from a master of the form.
No one has done more for the contemporary fairy tale than Kate Bernheimer. In eight new stories, she leads us into a forest of everyday magic and misfits, where dinosaurs wear pajamas and talking dolls ruin your life. Elegant and brutal, Bernheimer’s latest collection locates the existential loveliness of ideas amidst the topsy-turvy logic of things. This collection renews classic stories with intelligent wonder. Like one of Bernheimer’s girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, the reader will marvel.
Elegantly simple fairy tales of strangeness and wonder from a master of the form.
No one has done more for the contemporary fairy tale than Kate Bernheimer. In eight new stories, she leads us into a forest of everyday magic and misfits, where dinosaurs wear pajamas and talking dolls ruin your life. Elegant and brutal, Bernheimer’s latest collection locates the existential loveliness of ideas amidst the topsy-turvy logic of things. This collection renews classic stories with intelligent wonder. Like one of Bernheimer’s girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, the reader will marvel.
- Coffee House Press
- Paperback
- August 2014
- 167 Pages
- 9781566893473
Buy the Book
$15.95
About Kate Bernheimer
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale.” She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She founded and edits the literary journal Fairy Tale Review and lives in Arizona with her husband, the writer Brent Hendricks, and their daughter, Xia.
Praise
“[Bernheimer], an impassioned advocate for the relevancy of the fairy-tale genre, fills the whole strange, lovely book with such gems, reinventing traditional, timeless tales for new readers.” —Time Out New York
“With dinosaurs and pink sisters, shadows and talking dolls, librarians and totems, Bernheimer presents haunting looks at mothers and daughters, the magic of childhood, and the power of illusion, fantasy, and dreams.”—San Francisco Book Review
“Bernheimer manages to tickle the cerebrum without sacrificing surface pleasures.”—Star Tribune
“Hauntingly poetic. . . . By turns lovely and tragic, Bernheimer’s spare but captivating fables of femininity resonate like a string of sad but all-too-real and meaningful dreams. This is a collection readers won’t soon forget, one that rede- fines the fairy tale into something wholly original.”
—Booklist