Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
Brothers and Beasts is a creative delight, forcing some wonderful male writers and scholars to articulate their own relationship to fairy tales. It is insightful and intensely autobiographical. --Jeannine Blackwell, dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky and co-author of The Queen s Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women Writers, 1780 1900I read this enchanting collection cover-to-cover in two days. It s appealing and fresh, thoughtful and often funny; the writers reveal themselves in stunning array, naked but never tawdry. Brothers and Beasts is for anyone who likes a good tale and treasures the act of imagining. --Lydia Millet, author of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and My Happy LifeFor thousands of years, storytellers have drawn upon fairy tales to create fictions relevant to their own times, making use of their symbolic language to explore issues of gender, class, justice, power, and cultural identity. In Brothers and Beasts, twenty-four male writers make it clear why fairy tales are still important to a wide range of storytellers today. The essays here are both whimsical and scholarly; both archly provocative and deeply moving. This superb companion to Mirror, Mirror demonstrates the ways that the stories read in childhood continue to shape us as adults and why many writers return to them long after childhood is done. --Terri Windling, author of The Wood Wife and other books