fairy tales
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Personal, Political, and Poetic: A Conversation with Susan Briante
Susan Briante discusses The Market Wonders, her newest collection of poetry in which she draws on market indicators like the Dow Jones Industrial Average to construct a criticism of contemporary culture.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Fairy Tales, Trauma, Writing into Dissociation
Our bodies are incredible and intelligent things.
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Fantastic Beasts and Where to @ Them
Trolls have come a long way since their days guarding bridges. Over at Electric Literature, Andrew Ervin compares today’s Internet vermin to their bestial forbears.
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Fairytales Still Make Our Skin Crawl
Fairytales can be seen as formulaic, but these formulas provide the bones for modern writers to fill in as they please; adaptations of classic fairytales are still making bestseller lists and hitting the box office every few months, showing how…
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jennifer Whitaker
Jennifer Whitaker discusses her new collection The Blue Hour, persona poems, the violence in fairy tales, and writing about sexual abuse.
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This Week in Short Fiction
What’s a witch? Green skin, warts, and broomsticks? A hag bent over a foul, steaming cauldron? A cold-blooded queen in a wardrobe? One thing’s for certain: witches are feared and powerful. And they’re women. Maybe being a witch isn’t so…
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Capitalist Fairy Tales
However unbelievable they seem, Nathan Fielder’s doomed interactions with small business owners on Nathan For You are all too painfully real. But in an economic landscape as cockamamy as today’s, they might as well be the work of fantasy: Conditions…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Michael Cunningham’s collection of reimagined fairy tales, A Wild Swan, burst from a magic pumpkin and into the world. (Just kidding on the pumpkin part.) Cunningham is no stranger to short stories (see, notably, “White Angel”), but this…
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A Fairy Tale, Reimagined
There’s the crown-letted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of the comatose princess he’s meant to…
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Reinventing Myth and Genre for Fiction
Fables and fairy tales and folk tales can compel us on their own, but they’re also ripe for reinvention. Some authors may take the skeleton of a centuries-old story and use it as the basis for something new; others may…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This is the week of fantastical fiction, of the weird and the magical, of re-imagining fairy tales and urban legends, of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. On Tuesday, a new edition of Angela Carter’s seminal 1979 story…
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A Family of Charm, Wolves, and Turnips
Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal tales whose concerns are eternal, and to…