Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired 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. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon

Contents:

• Foreward: Drawing the Curtain by Gregory Maguire
• Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child by Joy Williams
• Ardour by Jonathon Keats
• I'm Here by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
• The Brother and the Bird by Alissa Nutting
• Hansel and Gretel by Francine Prose
• A Day in the Life by Kevin Brockmeier
• With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold by Neil LaBute
• The Swan Brothers by Shelley Jackson
• The Warm Mouth by Joyelle McSweeney
• Snow White, Rose Red by Lydia Millet
• The Erlking by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
• Dapplegrim by Brian Evenson
• The Wild Swans by Michael Cunningham
• Halfway People by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Mermaid by Timothy Schaffert
• What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body Is Gone by Katherine Vaz
• The Snow Queen by Karen Brennan
• Eyes of dogs by Lucy Corin
• Little Pot by Ilya Kaminsky
• A Bucket of Warm Spit by Michael Martone
• Catskin by Kelly Link
• Teague O'Kane and the Corpse by Chris Adrian
• Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay by Jim Shepard
• Body-without-Soul by Kathryn Davis
• The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone by Kellie Wells
• My Brother Gary Made a Movie and This Is What Happened by Sabrina Orah Mark
• The Color Master by Aimee Bender
• The White Cat by Marjorie Sandor
• Blue-Bearded Lover by Joyce Carol Oates
• Bluebeard in Ireland by John Updike
• A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper by Rabih Alameddine
• A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility by Stacey Richter
• Orange by Neil Gaiman
• Psyche's Dark Night by Francesca Lia Block
• The Story of the Mosquito by Lily Hoang
• First Day of Snow by Naoko Awa
• I Am Anjuhimeko by Hiromi Itō
• Coyote Takes Us Home by Michael Mejia
• Ever after by Kim Addonizio
• Whitework by Kate Bernheimer