fairy tales
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The Evolution of Fairy Tales
Fairy tales are a fundamental part of the human experience, an extension of the oral traditions of the earliest storytellers, and part of culture that becomes internalized. In part, the importance of fairy tales is their ability to change with…
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Changeling
The story of how I wrote my second novel begins in 1999, when my four-year-old daughter Anna had a minor accident that caused massive intercranial bleeding.
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The Companionship of Books
For Words without Borders, Can Xue describes her father’s “serious books” and how having them as companions led her to a “genuine spiritual pursuit.”
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Word of the Day: Epimythium
(n.); the moral appended to the end a story or fable; from the Greek epi (“upon”) + muthos (“story, fable”) “Once upon a time there was a princess who went out into the forest and sat down at the edge…
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Fairy Tales Uncut
The Guardian looks at a new English translation of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and finds stories that are much less child-friendly than the ones we know today.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Think of the most complicated and intriguing people you have ever met. Think of the way it feels to return to those people again and again, each time finding some new facet of truth, beauty, insight, originality. Michael Cunningham’s “White…
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Hunger is the Beginning
Desire is transformative, and transgressive: whether it’s an unpeeled onion or a noble lover, to want something, especially for women, can never be entirely benign. A common consequence for careless appetite in fairy tales is monstrous birth– a child that…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Jane Rosenberg LaForge discusses her new book An Unsuitable Princess, being a New York writer from L.A., and how women get short shrift in fairy tales.
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The New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: Anna Raff and Sophia Wiedeman
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights at 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat With Roxane Gay
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Roxane Gay about her new novel An Untamed State, fairy tales, and the reality of violence that women face every day, everywhere in the world.
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The Game of Love
In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after. She must be trapped in a tower or poisoned by an apple or forced to spin straw…
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Translators Lost in Translation
Once upon a time, folktales contained sex and violence. But as the stories were collected by cultural anthropologists, they were gradually stripped of this adult content in order to make them suitable for children. Moreover, these neutered children’s stories often…