Kate Bernheimer: 21 books

A Time Out New York Best Book of the Year. “[Bernheimer is] one of literature’s foremost champions of the fairy tale.” —Nylon   Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer’s latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just...

An imaginative, hauntingly poetic collection of contemporary fables that redefine the fairy tale for the modern woman.   In Kate Bernheimer’s familiar and spare—yet wondrous—world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger’s daughter befriends...

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold is a lavishly poetic novel that draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore and fairy stories to recount the visionary obsessions of a passionate young woman. The narrative moves freely through time and space, uniting Ketzia Gold's early...

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods.   Like...

Edward Hopper’s painting "Office at Night" is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on “the facts” of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.

Ochre is the color of our earliest stories. It is the color we chose when we wanted to make paintings on the walls of caves, in places that never did learn the name of sunlight. By the grace of small fires we etched in ochre; we coughed at the smoke in a confined area but also the absurdity of things...

When a wonderful new book arrives at the library, at first it is loved by all, checked out constantly, and rarely spends a night on the library shelf. But over time it grows old and worn, and the children lose interest in its story. The book is sent to the library's basement where the other faded...

Once there was a girl who lived in a castle. The castle was inside a museum. When children visited, they’d press against the glass globe in which the castle sat, to glimpse the tiny girl. But when they went home, the girl was lonely. Then one day, she had an idea! What if you hung a picture of yourself...

The sheer volume of responses to the first issue of Fairy Tale Review shows that fairy tales continue to be one of the most viable art forms. In fairy tales, all things are interdependent, mysteriously and insanely entwined. They contain a deeply ecological world. The Green Issue is devoted to new fairy...

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date. Despite this diversity the fairy tale pulse or “feel” is present in each piece in The Aquamarine Issue. What also contains this issue and...

The Blue Issue is the inaugural issue of Fairy Tale Review. Swiss scholar Max Luthi wrote about fairy tales as literary examples of abstract art. The strange quality that Luthi identifies as “firm form” is sparse, flat and depthless as it is wild, weightless and bright. The writing selected for the...

This issue is themed around yellow: the color of my skin, my namesake, the color used to describe four billion plus Asians, and this doesn’t even account for the diasporic population. Yellow, the color of diseased skin and diseased people. Yellow, the color of aging. All these denigrations contained...

When we speak of grey as a location, placing a thing into a grey area, the color represents territory where the definite becomes lost. Grey lets us know that the truth is not always clear; even the most well-known paths can turn strange when a low grey cloud of fog rolls in. Grey is an act of subtraction,...

Mauve is a new word with old roots. The color’s earlier incarnations—Tyrian purple (given for the shade of Roman emperors’ cloaks) and aniline purple—were abandoned when, to increase the popularity of Perkin’s dye, its sellers named the color after a French flower called the mallow. When we...