Evil Editor said...Greetings, lovers of fairy tales.
Dave Fragments said...My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me...With that title, I thought it was horror.
Evil Editor said...Instead it turned out to be porn. OK, I'm exaggerating. But these are not your mother's fairy tales.
Mother (Re)produces. said...You haven't met my mother.
Zachary Gole said...Well, that was an... odd assortment...
Mother (Re)produces. said...I thought I'd sit in on this one even though I completely failed to order my copy of the book in time...
Evil Editor said...I recommend ordering the next book as soon as this chat is over.
Dave Fragments said...To be honest EE, I wasn't thrilled with this. First, I didn't know most of the fairy tales and I had to go look them up, second, some of the stories weren't engaging and fairy tales are supposed to be engaging.
Zachary Gole said...I did like some of the stories, but to be honest a lot of them left me cold. There were rather too many that struck me as self-consciously artsy, as going out of their way to avoid the appearance of having a definite point.
Dave Fragments said...Thank you Zachary, I thought that I was the only one reading who missed the point. I did like Joyce Carol Oats' retelling of Bluebeard. I had just heard Bluebeard Castle by Bartok and it resonated nicely.
Zachary Gole said...Also, from the introduction, I'm not entirely clear on what the editor's definition of a fairy tale is, and what she feels the difference is between a fairy tale and fantasy fiction. She says "When asked by some contributors what a fairy tale was, I would answer: You already know." I'm not sure that answer was as useful as she thinks it was.
Evil Editor said...I admit that most of these weren't even what I would have called fairy tales. They're more like literary fiction. I assumed the author asked a bunch of authors to write fairy tales, and that they would submit fairy tales kids would enjoy. These are short stories for adults.
Zachary Gole said...The theme of the anthology did seem fairly loose. There were only a handful that I'd call fairy tales, and some of them didn't even seem to really be based on fairy tales except for a very tenuous connection that the reader might not make at all were it not for the titles and the author's notes.
Mother (Re)produces. said...I have read one of the stories in another anthology and was surprised to see it turn up in a fairy tale anthology. I'm thinking of Neil Gaiman's Orange; that was in YBSF 14. What fairy tale was that based on? I saw someone refer to the Odyssey, and thought, huh?
Zachary Gole said...As for whether Orange really was based on the Odyssey, though... that doesn't seem entirely clear. Gaiman doesn't actually say so, though he does mention the Odyssey in passing. Some authors mention in their notes several different fairy tales from which they took inspiration, and the editor in each case chose one of those tales to categorize the story by. It could be she simply associated Orange with the Odyssey because that's the only fairy tale (well, or somewhat fairy-tale-like story; I wouldn't really call the Odyssey a fairy tale) mentioned by name in the author's notes.
Evil Editor said...Actually, Gaiman opens his essay at the end by quoting someone who said something about the Odyssey. I'm not sure we're meant to think Orange is based on the Odyssey. He calls Orange a mistake story, a magic shop story, ...
Zachary Gole said...Right, that's what I mean; he doesn't say his story is based on the Odyssey, he only mentions it in passing in quoting from another work based on it.
Mother (Re)produces. said...That makes more sense. I was really struggling to see that connection.
Dave Fragments said...I couldn't make sense of the Neil Gaiman story and I love Gaiman as an author. For some reason he was incomprehensible this time...
Mother (Re)produces. said...Gaiman does do a lot of stuff short and long that are very fairy tale like; that's why i couldn't see why they chose this particular story...
Evil Editor said...The Gaiman one was a clever idea. One side of a "conversation," and you have to figure out what the questions are that are being answered.
Mother (Re)produces. said...Yes, I like the story. I just didn't get why it was in this book, but as i said, I haven't read the rest of the book so maybe it's as relevant as some of the other stuff.
Dave Fragments said...And I still couldn't make heads or tails of Gaiman's story. I must have been in a ugly mood that day. I'll have to go back and read it.
Zachary Gole said...Re Gaiman's story: I don't think you're supposed to try to figure out what question led to every single answer. Some of them may be irrelevant. Maybe you were overthinking it?
Dave Fragments said...That's entirely possible. I can be too literal. I know some of my feelings toward these stories were my personal preferences that decided to sprout like weeds in April.
Mother (Re)produces. said...Dave, I had to read it twice. It's just a bit of fun, really...
Evil Editor said...It's supposedly answers to a questionnaire. Theoretically Gaiman had a question in mind for each answer. I found it entertaining to try to figure out what each was, but it's not vital to do so, and in some cases pretty much a wild guess.
Dave Fragments said...When I read the title of the book, I thought "horror" like when I read the title of Poppy Brite's "Are you Loathsome tonight" but it didn't deliver.
Evil Editor said...I liked the seven dwarfs one, and Half of Rumplestilskin. I liked the ones that felt like fairy tales.
Zachary Gole said...Yeah, A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin was one of them I liked. Ardour, the second story, kind of got to me too, particularly after reading the author's notes.
Mother (Re)produces. said...I'm still looking forward to reading it; there are a lot of author's whose work I love on that list, so i would have ordered it anyway. sorry to hear some of it is so disappointing!
Evil Editor said...I'm sure you won't be disappointed if you go into it expecting literary stories rather than fairy tales.
Mother (Re)produces. said...what did you all think of kelly link's story in here? was it up to her usual standard?
Zachary Gole said...I'm not entirely sure I can say I _enjoyed_ Catskin, but I thought it was an interesting read, and I guess I can say I'm glad I read it. Though I can't say whether or not it was up to her usual standard, since I don't know what her usual standard is.
Evil Editor said...Kelly Link's was at least fairy tale-like but I thought it went on too long.
Dave Fragments said...I didn't get to Kelly Link's story. I had a cat attack me this month (I said April was lousy) and I didn't want to read about cats creeping around. Sorry. I'll read it this afternoon as punishment.
Mother (Re)produces. said...What about Aimee Bender?
Zachary Gole said...Ah, I'd forgotten that one. Yes, Aimee Bender's story was definitely one of the better ones, too.
Evil Editor said...I thought Aimee Bender's (The Color Master) was one of the best.
Dave Fragments said...I have notes on The Color Master and it is a good story. I liked it, sort of. It is an odd and very wonderful story in many ways but I don't know how it could be told to a child.
Zachary Gole said...In fact, on second thought, I might rate it above Catskin as the best story that actually felt like a fairy tale. Well... it may have been slightly less "fairy-tale-like" than Catskin (to my subjective eye), but I thought it was a better story.
Mother (Re)produces. said...OK! Well, then I at least have those two to look forward to.
Zachary Gole said...I think I may have been harsher on it in my last comment than I meant to be, though, when I said I wasn't sure I enjoyed it. Actually, of the few stories in the anthology that actually _did_ feel like fairy tales, I think it was the best.
Dave Fragments said...I liked the Teague O'Kane story and I liked the oddness of the Jack in the Beanstalk but not as kids stories as retelling for adults. Which, if that was the stated aim of the book, it succeeded. This was literary retelling of kids tails for adults. The book was successful that way.
Evil Editor said...I thought it got off to a bad start with the Audubon story. It felt like the author had an agenda. I don't recall reading fairy tales with characters who were real people.
Mother (Re)produces. said...What do you mean 'real people,' EE-like human, or like Donald Trump?
Evil Editor said...Like Donald Trump.
Mother (Re)produces. said...Hmmm...Would we know? it's possible that some known royalty was satirized in the early tales and we just don't see it any more. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the book.
Evil Editor said...Satirizing is fine, it's using actual people's names as characters that seemed un-fairytaleish. It happened in another story as well.
Mother (Re)produces. said...Mmmm...I'm really sorry I didn't get the book in time; that's what I get for living over here with all this chocolate.
Dave Fragments said...April was my month against the literary world. For instance, Baba Yaga's hut, the re-interpretation was nice if you knew that Audubon really did kill and mount his specimens. If you didn't know that, then the story was mildly heart-warming (pun intended).
Zachary Gole said...There were way too many that seemed to just follow a formula of "Let's write some present-day slice-of-life story and toss in a vague reference somewhere to a fairy tale", or "Let's write some non-linear patchwork of barely related vignettes associated with a fairy-tale."
Evil Editor said...In fairness, we are probably familiar with the twenty-five or fifty fairy tales that have stood the test of time, while hundreds or thousands of them have vanished. Thus we have very narrow ideas of what a fairy tale is, and can't expect everything in the book to measure up to the best of all time. If the editor has used only the 30 best stories it would have been a better book. By "30 best" I of course mean my 30 favorites. There are few if any here that would appeal to children.
Zachary Gole said...To be fair, I'm not sure how much a lot of genuine fairy tales would appeal to children, in their original forms. Heck, even in Grimms' Fairy Tales, there's a lot of stuff that children could find disturbing, and the Grimms actually did a lot of bowdlerization from their sources.
Mother (Re)produces. said...That's true, Zach, the Grimm's are Grim! and I do have the sanitized version. But these stories are in no way intended for kids, so.....?
Dave Fragments said...In the original German, RotKapchen (Red Riding Hood), the wolf did actually eat several characters.
Mother (Re)produces. said...yes, and the MC in the Robber bridegroom has a severed finger land in her lap.
[Perhaps it's worth inserting that nothing on the cover suggests that the book is not a good choice for children . . . Well, there's the title.--EE]
]Evil Editor said...I loved the writing in The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone. Fairy Tale -like, but clever wording that adults would appreciate. A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper was fairy tale-like. But with sex. I'm used to fairy tales having violence. Not so used to sex and bad language.
Zachary Gole said...As for fairy tales not having sex... that's one of the things the Grimms cut out. The original fairy tales did have sex. You know how the Grimms have Rapunzel remarking how the witch is so much heavier than the prince? That's not how it originally went; the Grimms changed it. How the version went that they originally found was that the witch figured out what was going on when Rapunzel remarked on how her dresses were getting tighter -- the implication being that Rapuy decided that wasn't appropriate for kids, so they changed it. Of course, the prince having his eyes poked out by thorns was perfectly child-friendly, apparently.
Mother (Re)produces. said...originally, the Grimm's tales had a lot of sex too. They were collected (in German) for historical purposes, and when they realized their popularity was with parents reading them to their children, they were edited for the second edition. Yes, Rapunzel was pregnant after that first visit from her prince charming. :)
Mother (Re)produces. said...I think the 'no sexual content' in fairy tales is something we can thank the 19th and 20th century for. The level of sophistication, otoh, that I'm assuming i will find in the book is something that would not be in kid's stories.
Zachary Gole said...But then, maybe the fact that I think it was less fairy-tale-like and the fact that I think it was a better story are related... fairy tales, as I'm used to them, aren't really necessarily good stories. Well, that's not exactly what I mean; they certainly have powerful themes and subjects that have kept them alive in the popular imagination for ages. But compared to modern stories, they're often meandering, somewhat nonsensical, and lacking in character development. (Heck, a lot of fairy tales don't even bother giving their protagonists names.) In that sense, Catskin was definitely fairy-tale-like; it meandered quite a bit, and threw together a lot of interesting things that didn't really follow logically (though it did perhaps have rather more well fleshed out characters than a typical fairy tale). The Color Master (Aimee Bender's story) was more focused and had more of a coherent plot, which I guess may be what made it seem slightly less fairy-tale-like to me. But maybe I'm being a little unjust to fairy tales.
Zachary Gole said...I'm not trying to put down fairy tales, by the way; I do have a strong interest in fairy tales myself -- I own all the Andrew Lang Fairy books and a complete book of Grimm's, and one of the many projects I have on the back burner that I may never get around to finishing is a series of books expanding on well-known fairy tales. Nothing against fairy tales, but there are some differences between fairy tales and modern fiction.
Mother (Re)produces. said...For what it's worth, I'm even keener to read the book now than I was before.
Evil Editor said...I liked the authors' discussions of how they chose to write their stories in most cases. And I'm glad the contents told what each story was based on.
Zachary Gole said...I did enjoy the author's notes, yes (most of them, except in at least one case (My Brother Gary Made A Movie And This Is What Happened) when the author took the author's notes as an excuse for writing more pretentious palaver). Like I said, to me the author's notes on Ardour, in particular, put the story in a new light.
Dave Fragments said...I must admit, after a couple stories I almost didn't read anymore and I was glad I stuck to reading some of the later stories.
Zachary Gole said...You know, I was afraid I wasn't going to have anything to say during this book chat. That... has turned out not to be a problem, apparently.
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