At the height of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was asked to speak at an informal recovery meeting by a friend I had met ten years earlier in a twelve-step fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts. I got sober relatively young, at the age of twenty-four, and have remained sober and active in twelve-step recovery since October 26, 2008. Sobriety has been the singular blessing of my life, and in my time in recovery I’ve witnessed miraculous things occur in my life and the lives of other recovering people. And yet, to this day, one of the most impressive remains watching how quickly and e ..read more

Founding Editor Kate Bernheimer will edit the twentieth annual issue of Fairy Tale Review. Vol. 20 will not have a theme. We are looking for your best new work. Please familiarize yourself with the contents of our print issues. Submissions will be accepted March 15, 2023 – July 15, 2023. We ask that all submissions adhere to the following general guidelines: All work must be submitted using our Submittable portal. We do not accept submissions via email or postal service. Submissions must be previously unpublished, both in print and online. Submissions must be previously unpublished, both in p ..read more

As we come to the end of 2022, we’re pleased to announce our Pushcart Prize nominations from The Lilac Issue. They are ..read more

“We gays cast our nets out into the mythic sea, searching for our own lost archetypes…those symbols of the human psyche which we may claim as emblematic of our own particular way of being.” –Stanley Johnson, “On the Banks of the River Time Looking Inland”  The Rainbow Issue of Fairy Tale Review will be dedicated to queer fairy tales written by queer writers. Prose Editor Benjamin Schaefer will serve as Editor for the issue. Since its inception, Fairy Tale Review has been committed to contributor diversity and inclusive engagement. While The Rainbow Issue will be dedicated to queer fairy ..read more

This Editor’s Note has three parts. As with all of my Editor’s Notes, I ask that you daydream while you read it. My students are often delighted that I encourage them to daydream during my lectures, even to sleep. I stand by this policy with intellectual rigor. There is a fairy tale theory hidden inside it. And besides, sleep and dreams are the themes of this year’s issue. To the Editor’s Note we go. * Fairy tales are imaginary places with real words in them. I often repeat this sentence to myself, and in my lectures. Its inspiration is Marianne Moore’s famous phrase from her famous poem “Poe ..read more

Curled on a couch, wrapped in seaweed and crystalline pastimes, the alkali like so many horses dead in the dry reservoir, I turned the weather away from the fingers and birds. This might be the end of all sympathy, the terminus of our voyage into the basement where I construct replicas and insinuations. The pipes sing to me about everything I used to know, nothing I remember, and now I am barefoot on the train tracks. I remove a splinter from a mirror. There was movement under the bed. I was careful to interrupt the nightmare until the water rose to my neck, and I could hear the bells busy in ..read more

Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice, fairy-status undiscovered, role of godmother yet realized. It doesn’t matter how all that will come to be, only that right now she works at a diner, spends the day penciling people’s orders on a notepad and running back and forth from the kitchen to her tables, carrying plates of eggs and buttered toast, a practiced smile on her face. On her breaks, she smokes outside on the picnic table by the road, or calls her children, who are with her ex-husband this ..read more

man in the land of Uz   you don’t know the first thing about a crow where to trace its roots when to call the doctor in the summer what words to say to its siblings you keep a quiet house on sundays         you lay your plenty under the basil           your mother taught you everything is not promised in the rain         ants creep into your grooves            you are somewhere between a sound and a thought you cannot hold the line in memory feathers are flares look here      ..read more

after Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” Their daughter was unusual, born with dirt caked inside her skeleton, packed in so tight she resembled a real child, the hard lines of her face so much like her grandmother who was born without arms who, when given to her mother, sprouted leather wings instead, and when fully grown could not hold her own children for the flapping. The daughter would bake large loaves of bread, iced cinnamon buns and hang them from every branch of every tree. Say grandmother, come to me, come show me how to be a girl in this deformed world, to carry the silence of turning ins ..read more

  Queen of Hearts The Queen is beating around her bushes, yelling to the tens and fives: Quick! quicken the blooms, redden the forlorn bleachy roses, their thorny teeth, their clichéd form! The rogue hedgehogs             tuck and roll, avoiding blush feathers and mineral beaks, unlucky beasts break for the bushes. At night she unlaces             her corset, sloughs off exhausted gowns in hues carmine, rubicund and scarlet. She sips a neat sip. The blackness of the Queen’s night is             eter ..read more