Horse, Flower, Bird »

Kate Bernheimer is the author of two novels and the children’s book The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. She is also the editor of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review, and three anthologies, including My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (forthcoming from Penguin in 2010). An Associate Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette each spring, she spends the rest of the year in Tucson, Arizona.

An artist and fiction writer, Rikki Ducornet has illustrated books by Robert Coover, Jorge Luis Borges, Forrest Gander, and Joanna Howard. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including, most recently, at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Salvador Allende Museum in Santiago, Chile.

Eight marvelous, melancholy new fairy tales for daring readers.

Publishers Weekly

Deep-seated fears find their way into these eight brief, dark adult fairy tales by Bernheimer (The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum). In "A Doll's Tale," a sad child named Astrid loves a life-size doll to distraction, even though it is "haughty and mean." When the doll is lost, then replaced by an imaginary friend who runs away, Astrid eventually becomes more doll-like than either of her companions. Another woman conspires, in "A Petting Zoo Tale," to keep a small menagerie in her basement, unbeknownst to her distracted lawyer husband. And what to make of the wounded and delirious protagonist of "Whitework"? Taking refuge in a remote cottage, she becomes obsessed with the intricate designs of the white-on-white embroidery she finds there. These stories are the product of a vivid imagination and crafty manipulation by their skillful creator. Pity there are not more drawings by Ducornet. (Sept.)