June 2013 - My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

Amazon blurb: The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.

We chose a group of stories to focus on since this book weighs in at just over 500 pages, much longer than we usually handle.

Here is the list:

Lydia Millett "Snow White, Rose Red"

Rikki Duncornet "Green Air"

Timothy Schaffert "The Mermaid in the Tree"

Katherine Vaz "What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body is Gone"

Karen Brennan "The Snow Queen"

Michael Martone "A Bucket of Warm Spit"

Kelly Link "Catskin"

Aimee Bender "The Color Master"

Stacey Richter "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedures and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility"

Neil Gaiman "Orange"

Francesca Lia Block "Psyche's Dark Night"

See you all at the next meetup!