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

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Kim Addonizio is the author of several collections of poetry, including Lucifer at the Starlite, as well as the novels Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street and the story collection In the Box Called Pleasure.

Chris Adrian is the author of the novels Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He is a pediatrician in San Francisco.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Hakawati, Koolaids, and I, the Divine, and the story collection The Perv. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut.

Naoko Awa (1943–1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese literature from Japan Women’s University.

Aimee Bender is the author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures and the novels An Invisible Sign of My Own and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

Francesca Lia Block is the author of many books, including Dangerous Angels, the Weetzie Bat books, Wood Nymph Meets Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide, Pretty Dead, Blood Roses, and The Rose and the Beast.

Karen Brennan is the author of the poetry collection The Real Enough World, the story collection The Garden in Which I Walk, and the memoir Being with Rachel.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has received a PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA grant.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Kafka Prize. She has been a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA fellowship, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

Lucy Corin is the author of the story collection The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, as well as the novels A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen, Specimen Days, and Flesh and Blood.

Kathryn Davis lives in Vermont and spends part of the year as senior fiction writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of the novels Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, Versailles, and The Thin Place, and is the recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award.

Rikki Ducornet is the author of the novels The Jade Cabinet, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Fan Maker’s Inquisition, a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and Netsuke, among others. She has received a Lannan fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brian Evenson is the author The Open Curtain, a finalist for an Edgar Award, as well as Last Days, Fugue State, The Wavering Knife, Dark Property, and The Brotherhood of Mutilation. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, and others.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of several novels, including Sister Noon and Wit’s End, as well as a number of short stories. She has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Commonwealth Medal, and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club was a New York Times bestseller.

Neil Gaiman is the author of many books for adults and children, including Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and the Newbery Medal-winning The Graveyard Book.

Lily Hoang’s books include Parabola, Changing (winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award), The Evolutionary Revolution, and Invisible Women.

Hiromi Itō has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize. For a selection of her work, see Killing Kanoko: Selected Poetry of Hiromi Itō.

Shelley Jackson is the author of the novel Half-Life, the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa in the former USSR and came to the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa, for which he won the Whiting Writers Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Lannan fellowship. He teaches at San Diego State University.

Jonathon Keats is a writer and artist. He is the author of the story collection The Book of the Unknown as well as two novels, The Pathology of Lies and Lighter Than Vanity. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine.

Neil LaBute is a writer, director, and playwright. His first film, In the Company of Men, debuted at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was followed by Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty, and Possession, among others. For the stage, LaBute has written plays that have been performed around the world, including The Shape of Things, Fat Pig, Some Girls, and the Tony Award-nominated reasons to be pretty. He is also the author of the story collection Seconds of Pleasure.

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen. Her stories have won Nebula awards, a Hugo Award, a Locus Award, and a World Fantasy Award. Link is cofounder and coeditor of Small Beer Press and of the zine Lady Churchill Rosebud’s Wristlet.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the novels Nylund, The Sarcographer, and Flet, as well as the poetry books The Red Bird and The Commandrine and Other Poems. She is a cofounder and coeditor of Action Books and the online quarterly Action, Yes.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum and of the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales. She has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Glenn Schaeffer Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Michael Martone is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including Michael Martone, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, The Blue Guide to Indiana, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Double Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone.

Michael Mejia is the author of the novel Forgetfulness. He has been the recipient of a Literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Lydia Millet is the author of many works of fiction, including Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Prize), How the Dead Dream, My Happy Life (winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction), George Bush: Dark Prince of Love, and Love in Infant Monkeys.

Alissa Nutting is the author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, a collection of stories.

Joyce Carol Oates has won the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is the author of the national best-sellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), among many other books.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is the award-winning author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. The progenitor of the women’s fiction movement in modern Russian letters, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. She lives in Moscow.

Francine Prose is the author of more than twenty books. Her nonfiction includes Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife; Sicilian Odyssey; The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired; Gluttony; and Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her novels include Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Goldengrove, and A Changed Man.

Stacey Richter is the author of the story collections My Date with Satan and Twin Study.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of three books, including Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, and The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, which won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction.

Timothy Schaffert is the author of the novels The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, Devils in the Sugar Shop, and The Coffins of Little Hope. He is the online editor of Prairie Schooner, a contributing editor to Fairy Tale Review, and the director of the (downtown) Omaha lit fest and the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference.

Jim Shepard’s books include the novels Project X and Nosferatu and the story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which won The Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

John Updike (1932–2009) wrote more than fifty books, including collections of stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Katherine Vaz is the author of the novels Saudade and Mariana and the story collections Fado & Other Stories, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Kellie Wells is the author of the story collection Compression Scars, which won the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and the novel Skin.

Joy Williams is the author of many books, including The Quick and The Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Changeling, a finalist for the National Book Award, Honored Guest, and Taking Care.