Manikin
"You will be free when the house is immaculate, the manikin said. Then it took the coffee and left, stolen feet heavy on the gleaming floor. The house shivered..."
Angela Carter – The Company of Wolves
the penultimate story in The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s influential collection of reworked fairy tales
How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga
"A yolk is not just a yolk: at the bottom of all that gold is a secret only the witches see. You aren’t a witch. Choke down the battered yolks…
The Wolf and the Wedding by Svetlana Ilyinykh and Rachelle Desimone
In Ksusha's village of Chudovo, everyone knew the wolf. He appeared at the edge of the forest whenever there was a wedding feast.
True Crime Fairy Tale
Was the tale of Hansel and Gretel inspired by a real crime in German history? It would make for a great story, if it were true. This week’s episode comes…
The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles
At a time now past, a cat was born. This was not so long after the first cats came to Japan, so they were rare and mostly lived near the…
“Miss Snowfall” by Sofia Samatar
In Fallow, a group of people, like the Amish, or perhaps more precisely the Mennonites, build a new Noah’s arc, leave the Earth (which has been poisoned), and drift through…
The Candy Children’s Mother by A.A. Balaskovits
My grandmother once told me that once you go into the forest, you come back a changeling. Or you don’t come back at all.
A Meditation on Forests, Life, and Art: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree”
“The Fir Tree” was originally published in New Fairy Tales, Second Collection (1844) next to another winter tale, The Snow Queen. It was swiftly overshadowed by that other story and…