How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

A Time Out New York Best Book of the Year. “[Bernheimer is] one of literature’s foremost champions of the fairy tale.” —Nylon Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer’s latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer’s girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone. “Deftly blends gloomy fairy tales with existential manifestos. Nine nimble stories confront a spectrum of suffering; loneliness, addiction, poverty, and death lay exposed with open language for all to interpret.” —Entrophy “[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 “I’ll read anything [Kate Bernheimer] writes, and I’ll undoubtedly learn more about myself and my own writing than from 100 other books. Truth is, I hope every young writer is lucky enough to discover a particular writer who speaks to her more than any other, a writer whose words reach out through the pages and touch her heart, the way Kate Bernheimer has done for me.” —Electric Literature “Bernheimer manages to tickle the cerebrum without sacrificing surface pleasures.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune