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lannthacker's review against another edition
Although I only read a handful, these were delightfully strange tales. They were at once familiar and new. A nice book to have around for rainy or winter afternoons.
ridgewaygirl's review against another edition
4.0
Dedicated to Angela Carter, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is a collection of forty fairy tales written by an impressively wide array of authors, from Neil Gaiman and Jim Shepard to Aimee Bender and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and adapting, reimagining or loosely basing stories on everything from our most traditional fairy tales to mythology to fairy tales from Asia and Japan. Will it surprise you to find out that Joyce Carol Oates chose Bluebeard? Or that John Updike picked the same tale, but told it from Bluebeard's point of view and set it in modern Ireland?
In any collection this diverse, some stories are amazing, a few fall flat and a handful are fantastically bizarre. It took me quite a while to read all forty tales, they not being the kind of thing to read one after another. I liked that the editor, Kate Bernheimer, chose several stories by new authors, some of whom have not yet written a full-length novel and others who are not well known. She also included several non-Western authors, who adapted stories from their own countries and made the collection a bit unexpected; without the easy handle of a familiar plot to anchor the reader they demanded a little more of me. My only complaint has to do with the book's organization; with the fairy tale each story is based on found only in the table of contents and information about each author stuck in the back, I was constantly flipping around before and after each story.
In any collection this diverse, some stories are amazing, a few fall flat and a handful are fantastically bizarre. It took me quite a while to read all forty tales, they not being the kind of thing to read one after another. I liked that the editor, Kate Bernheimer, chose several stories by new authors, some of whom have not yet written a full-length novel and others who are not well known. She also included several non-Western authors, who adapted stories from their own countries and made the collection a bit unexpected; without the easy handle of a familiar plot to anchor the reader they demanded a little more of me. My only complaint has to do with the book's organization; with the fairy tale each story is based on found only in the table of contents and information about each author stuck in the back, I was constantly flipping around before and after each story.
cimorene1558's review against another edition
3.0
Not actually finished, but I've read as much as I'm able to at the moment. The quality and interest of these is so varied, and I'm just not willing to read through a bunch of not-very appealing stories in case I find another good one.
nattyg's review against another edition
2.0
Most of these stories are awful. Either the author tried too hard, was on different drugs than the reader, has never read fairy tales, wrote the story ages before and then never read it again, or deconstructed the tale so much the reader never stood a chance of understanding it (except in the blurb after). I can count on one had the interesting stories and still have a finger left over.
Ugh. I recommend to no one this book. Spare yourself 480pgs of misery (book is 512pgs)
2015 PopSugar Reading challenge: a book of short stories
Ugh. I recommend to no one this book. Spare yourself 480pgs of misery (book is 512pgs)
2015 PopSugar Reading challenge: a book of short stories
elle_est_belle's review against another edition
3.0
Some of these new fairytales are quite good, well-written and calling to mind some of the originals on which they were based. Others were disturbing and not in a good way, often relying on shock value rather than quality writing. This was disheartening to me, as many of these stories were written by well-known authors. Overall, a mediocre collection.
mattlefevers's review against another edition
3.0
I saw this book at an indie bookstore in Santa Cruz and grabbed it immediately. It is exactly the kind of book I'd hope to buy from an indie bookstore in Santa Cruz.
The three-star rating I've given this is due to its greatest strength being its greatest weakness. It is very long. There are a ton of short stories in here (forty, in fact!) and the sheer volume allows certain tales to bring the class curve down. There is some avant-garde stuff in here, and that's coming from somebody who ranks "House of Leaves" in my top five favorite books. I read the short play "The Warm Mouth" twice and maybe still didn't understand it; "Body-without-Soul" started off so awesome that I quite literally became depressed when the story went nowhere; and some of the tales towards the end were such a bewildering experiment in word salad that it was less like reading a story and more like staring at those random letters that scroll by in The Matrix. I read this whole book cover to cover but if I were to loan it to a friend, I would feel the need to mark off certain entries in yellow caution tape to warn them away.
Now that I've made it sound terrible: way more of these are good than bad. And some are astonishing. Aimee Bender is one of my favorite short story writers (her name on the cover is probably what sealed the deal for me), and her story "The Color Master" was so beautiful I couldn't look away. "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" by Chris Adrian was super fun and compelling, and I've never read Joy Williams before but her entry "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" is a magnificent and creative start to the book.
For a collection whose theme is "fairy tales", some of the best stories were the ones furthest removed from their roots. Jim Shepard's "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is a quiet, deep story that I saw no traces of fairy tale in but loved all the same, and "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure..." (Stacey Richter) is a hilariously inventive take on dry, academic nonfiction.
The author whose story most made me want to check out some more of their work was Timothy Schaffert, whose longish tale "The Mermaid in the Tree" was simultaneously moving and chock-full of cleverness and detail. The quirky, dark world he paints, in which mermaids coexist with humans but as a sort of second-class citizen, almost feels wasted in such a short form. I loved it.
Overall, for anyone who loves that grim, mysterious vibe of classic, pre-Disney fairy tales -- rife with amputations and child endangerment, untrustworthy animals and black magic -- I would absolutely recommend this volume... though I could give you some suggestions regarding which ones to skip.
The three-star rating I've given this is due to its greatest strength being its greatest weakness. It is very long. There are a ton of short stories in here (forty, in fact!) and the sheer volume allows certain tales to bring the class curve down. There is some avant-garde stuff in here, and that's coming from somebody who ranks "House of Leaves" in my top five favorite books. I read the short play "The Warm Mouth" twice and maybe still didn't understand it; "Body-without-Soul" started off so awesome that I quite literally became depressed when the story went nowhere; and some of the tales towards the end were such a bewildering experiment in word salad that it was less like reading a story and more like staring at those random letters that scroll by in The Matrix. I read this whole book cover to cover but if I were to loan it to a friend, I would feel the need to mark off certain entries in yellow caution tape to warn them away.
Now that I've made it sound terrible: way more of these are good than bad. And some are astonishing. Aimee Bender is one of my favorite short story writers (her name on the cover is probably what sealed the deal for me), and her story "The Color Master" was so beautiful I couldn't look away. "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" by Chris Adrian was super fun and compelling, and I've never read Joy Williams before but her entry "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" is a magnificent and creative start to the book.
For a collection whose theme is "fairy tales", some of the best stories were the ones furthest removed from their roots. Jim Shepard's "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is a quiet, deep story that I saw no traces of fairy tale in but loved all the same, and "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure..." (Stacey Richter) is a hilariously inventive take on dry, academic nonfiction.
The author whose story most made me want to check out some more of their work was Timothy Schaffert, whose longish tale "The Mermaid in the Tree" was simultaneously moving and chock-full of cleverness and detail. The quirky, dark world he paints, in which mermaids coexist with humans but as a sort of second-class citizen, almost feels wasted in such a short form. I loved it.
Overall, for anyone who loves that grim, mysterious vibe of classic, pre-Disney fairy tales -- rife with amputations and child endangerment, untrustworthy animals and black magic -- I would absolutely recommend this volume... though I could give you some suggestions regarding which ones to skip.
amberhayward's review against another edition
3.0
So the great thing about a 500+ page book of short stories is you can skip the ones you don't like immediately and not miss anything and probably not even feel bad! I recommend not skipping is The Mermaid in the Tree. That's maybe one of my favorite short stories ever.
nssutton's review against another edition
3.0
Depending on what day and story you caught me, I either loved this anthology or absolutely hated it. I planned to make a list of the stories I preferred best, but so much time has passed that I would rather spend those extra few minutes reading. I will know to turn to this anthology whenever wanting to read that story of mermaids that I really like, or to read my favorite short story -- Pleasure Boating in Lithuya Bay, or to remember the stories about the juniper tree and the wild swans. I'll also remembered the eye rolls I spent flipping through some impossible to read stories that shall remain nameless. I guess I shouldn't be surprised I preferred the stories by authors I already knew I loved -- Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Neil Gaiman -- to some of the others, but I still was. That sort of surprise is always my reader's delight, when you can learn an author and return to them again and again, never receiving the same gift twice, but always leaving satisfied.
I turned to fairy tales -- dark fairy tales -- in all corners of my life during this read. I am watching A Series of Unfortunate Events with my classes through testing, which I feel is a very dark and modern take on fairy tales (go ahead, argue me like my sixth graders -- absence of parents, precious children, evil adults, having to outsmart those in charge of you) There is one part I liked watching over and over with the kids.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRV5v1Rl8IA
I like observing that moment where my students get it. Violet and Klaus find the inheritance law book, then the train schedule, then we see the train in the distance and all of a sudden the whole vibe in the room would shift. I loved watching that click over and over again.
And my penchant for dark movies extended to more adult ones as well, as I watched Black Swan for the first time. I was totally terrified of watching it - it's not the sort of thing I could handle in a movie theater, as I can't even really bring myself to watch scary movie trailers. I found myself getting really into it. Not only was it one of the best executed movies I've ever seen, it serendipitously fit into everything else that was going on in my pop culture life.
And this dark theme found it's way into my morning commute soundtracks, as I listened to Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy every day for over a week. I found I could only listen to it in the morning or at the beginning of a journey -- only when I was going somewhere, never when I was returning from one.
The anthology seemed to tie together all of these little things that would have seemed like isolated incidents without this point to fix them. I like how longer reads can extend themselves into this sort of mood, like how reading Justin Cronin's The Passage will forever cement in time the first few weeks I moved into the back bedroom of my apartment that I didn't know how I was going to afford the rent for as my hours at the library remained reduced.
I turned to fairy tales -- dark fairy tales -- in all corners of my life during this read. I am watching A Series of Unfortunate Events with my classes through testing, which I feel is a very dark and modern take on fairy tales (go ahead, argue me like my sixth graders -- absence of parents, precious children, evil adults, having to outsmart those in charge of you) There is one part I liked watching over and over with the kids.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRV5v1Rl8IA
I like observing that moment where my students get it. Violet and Klaus find the inheritance law book, then the train schedule, then we see the train in the distance and all of a sudden the whole vibe in the room would shift. I loved watching that click over and over again.
And my penchant for dark movies extended to more adult ones as well, as I watched Black Swan for the first time. I was totally terrified of watching it - it's not the sort of thing I could handle in a movie theater, as I can't even really bring myself to watch scary movie trailers. I found myself getting really into it. Not only was it one of the best executed movies I've ever seen, it serendipitously fit into everything else that was going on in my pop culture life.
And this dark theme found it's way into my morning commute soundtracks, as I listened to Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy every day for over a week. I found I could only listen to it in the morning or at the beginning of a journey -- only when I was going somewhere, never when I was returning from one.
The anthology seemed to tie together all of these little things that would have seemed like isolated incidents without this point to fix them. I like how longer reads can extend themselves into this sort of mood, like how reading Justin Cronin's The Passage will forever cement in time the first few weeks I moved into the back bedroom of my apartment that I didn't know how I was going to afford the rent for as my hours at the library remained reduced.
stefs_library's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
This was a collection of stories, so some of the stories were 5 stars and some were 1 star. But the ones that were good were really good.
waclements7's review against another edition
2.0
This was a hit and miss read for me—mostly a miss. I read it because it was recommended for a class I am going to be taking and am now feeling more than a little leery about.
Many of the stories are just weird and disturbing and sometimes disgusting. I think this book is very much a matter of individual taste.
Many of the stories are just weird and disturbing and sometimes disgusting. I think this book is very much a matter of individual taste.