New Fairytales!

This is the rather lovely cover of 'New Fairytales: Essays & Stories', a gorgeous book of poems, critical essays and new fairy stories - one of which, 'Gnomes', is mine.  Though is it really a fairytale? I don't know. I don't often write black humour, but this was an exception, and as the entire book is an exploration and celebration of new fairytales, anyone who reads it is free to decide for themselves.

Here is the lip-licking list of contents.

NEW FAIRY TALES: ESSAYS AND STORIES

John Patrick Pazdziora and Defne Çizakça, editors

Introduction
John Patrick Pazdziora and Defne Çizakça
Chapter 0. Galantha
Joshua Richards

Part I. Minatures
Chapter 1. Glass, Bricks, Dust
Claire Massey
Chapter 2. Robert Herrick’s Fairy Epithalamium and Natural Religion
Jesse Sharpe
Chapter 3. Anti-Fairy Tale Taxidermy: The Animations of Tessa Farmer
Catriona McAra
Chapter 4. Gnomes
Katherine Langrish

Part II. Storytellers
Chapter 5. Are there Fairies Nowadays? Modern Fairy Tales in Hebrew
Hanna Livnat and Gaby Cohn
Chapter 6. Deciphering the Ottoman Fairy Tale: Tayyarzade throughout the Centuries
Defne Çizakça
Chapter 7. Cloud Catching in the Realm of the Drought King
Fiona Thackeray
Chapter 8. “On Fairy-stories” and Tolkien’s Elvish Tales
Christopher MacLachlan
Chapter 9. “Oh, You Wicked Storytellers!”
John Patrick Pazdziora

Part III. Shadows and Reflections
Chapter 10. A Prevailing Wind
Elizabeth Reeder
Chapter 11. Not for Children: The Development of Nihilism
in the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Colin Cavendish-Jones
Chapter 12. Radiant Mysteries: George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and
the Claritas of Fairy Tales
Daniel Gabelman
Chapter 13. The Land with No Stories
Eric M. Pazdziora

Part IV. Fairy Brides
Chapter 14. In the Midst of Metamorphosis: Yōko Tawada’s The Bridegroom Was a Dog
Mayako Murai
Chapter 15. A Gothic Fairy-Bride and the Fall: A Lecture on “The End of the World”
in Kenjirō Hata’s Hayate no Gotoku
Joshua Richards
Chapter 16. Dante
Joshua Richards

Part V. Fairy Tale Pedagogy
Chapter 17. Footsteps in the Classroom: “The Little Mermaid” and First-Year Writing
Kate Wolford
Chapter 18. Dragons in Hereville: Comics as a Vehicle for Fairy Tales
Orlando Dos Reis and Emily Midkiff
Chapter 19. Little Sparrow
Kirstin Zhang
Chapter 20. Beedle’s Moral Imagination
Travis Prinzi
Chapter 21. The Sea in the Hat
Tori Truslow


New Fairytales is available for purchase on Amazon here in the US or here if you’re in the UK, both in print and e-book formats. Other outlets to follow soon.

Unsettling Wonder

We craft and tell stories because we’ve stood on the uncertain edge between the waking world and our imagination, between enchantment and fear. And we remember other stories that help us build our own stories, scraps of lumber and fragments of narrative we gather together to make stories for ourselves.

Unsettling Wonder is a new fairytale journal dedicated to the retelling and re-imagining of traditional fairytales and folktales.  Not so much putting a new spin on them, as understanding their eternal relevance:

We want to tell these tales, not as deconstruction or subversion, not as nostalgia or sentiment, but in the same way these stories have always been told—spun out and re-imagined by the tale-teller in the moment of telling, for the ones who hear it, to reclaim the magic of story.

Unsettling Wonder has only just been born, and in the way of fairytale parents we, its founders, are still looking it proudly, scratching our heads and wondering what it will make of life. Has it been born in a caul, or under a lucky star? Will its godmother be the Fairy of Good Fortune, or the sinister black-cowled figure of La Muerte?  Is it even a child, or just a bristly half-hedgehog? Anyway, do come to the christening!

The website is live, so please visit to find out more about who we are and what we hope to do.  You'll find an introductory article by me about the long history of fairytales and why we still want to write them.  And I'll keep you posted as Unsettling Wonder grows, develops, and - we hope - finds its place in the world.