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The Rumpus Interview with Aimee Bender
Skylight Books was packed. Standing room only. People sat under the green canopy of the Benjamin ficus in the middle of the bookstore, they stood in Gardening and Pets, they stooped in the kiddies’...
View ArticleFairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
In the 1920s, while living in Paris, poet E. E. Cummings wrote fairy tales for his only little daughter Nancy, which was an unknown fact until 1965.Only four survived and published in a small booklet...
View ArticleScary Stories for a New Generation
We haven’t stopped creating fairy tales and folklore—we just do it online now.For Aeon magazine, Will Wiles has a splendid longread about “creepypasta,” the phenomenon of writing and disseminating...
View ArticleGrimm Fairy Tales Just Got Grimmer
British art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books.Over at...
View ArticleTranslators Lost in Translation
Once upon a time, folktales contained sex and violence. But as the stories were collected by cultural anthropologists, they were gradually stripped of this adult content in order to make them suitable...
View ArticleThe Game of Love
In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after. She must be trapped in a tower or poisoned by an apple or forced to...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat With Roxane Gay
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Roxane Gay about her new novel An Untamed State, fairy tales, and the reality of violence that women face every day, everywhere in the world.This is an edited transcript...
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The New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: Anna Raff and Sophia Wiedeman
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights at 7-9 p.m. EST in New York...
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The Rumpus Interview with Jane Rosenberg LaForge
When I first opened An Unsuitable Princess, Jane Rosenberg LaForge’s fantasy/memoir hybrid, I was at first unsettled to see that almost half the book was in footnotes. That’s not usually the kind of...
View ArticleHunger is the Beginning
Desire is transformative, and transgressive: whether it’s an unpeeled onion or a noble lover, to want something, especially for women, can never be entirely benign. A common consequence for careless...
View ArticleThis Week in Short Fiction
Think of the most complicated and intriguing people you have ever met. Think of the way it feels to return to those people again and again, each time finding some new facet of truth, beauty, insight,...
View ArticleFairy Tales Uncut
The Guardian looks at a new English translation of the first edition of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales and finds stories that are much less child-friendly than the ones we know today.Related...
View ArticleWord of the Day: Epimythium
(n.); the moral appended to the end a story or fable; from the Greek epi (“upon”) + muthos (“story, fable”)“Once upon a time there was a princess who went out into the forest and sat down at the edge...
View ArticleThe Companionship of Books
For Words without Borders, Can Xue describes her father’s “serious books” and how having them as companions led her to a “genuine spiritual pursuit.”Related Posts:Fairy Tales UncutTranslators Lost in...
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Changeling
I shall be telling this with a sigh…My long-delayed second novel, Come Away, is about to be published, and along with the usual mélange of emotions (love it! hate every word of it! want to kiss the...
View ArticleThe Evolution of Fairy Tales
Fairy tales are a fundamental part of the human experience, an extension of the oral traditions of the earliest storytellers, and part of culture that becomes internalized. In part, the importance of...
View ArticleA Family of Charm, Wolves, and Turnips
Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal...
View ArticleThis Week in Short Fiction
This is the week of fantastical fiction, of the weird and the magical, of re-imagining fairy tales and urban legends, of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. On Tuesday, a new edition...
View ArticleReinventing Myth and Genre for Fiction
Fables and fairy tales and folk tales can compel us on their own, but they’re also ripe for reinvention. Some authors may take the skeleton of a centuries-old story and use it as the basis for...
View ArticleA Fairy Tale, Reimagined
There’s the crown-letted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of the...
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