Two of our editors, John Patrick Pazdziora and Defne Çizakça, are being interviewed by the remarkable Kate Wolford at Enchanted Conversation. They’re talking about a new fairy tale anthology that a lot of Unsettling Wonder editors took part in, as did Professor Wolford herself. The book launch for the anthology was yesterday, so we asked Ms Çizakça to write a bit about the anthology, and why it’s an important development in the study of—and delight in—fairy tales. You can read her post below, and then head over to Enchanted Conversation to read further the interview with her and Dr Pazdziora.
New Fairy Tales: Essays and Stories
Available to buy from
www.tinyrul.com/NewFairyTales or
http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Fairy-Tales-Essays-Stories/dp/0982963386
We are happy to announce the publication of New Fairy Tales: Essays and Stories to all our readers here at Unsettling Wonder.
New Fairy Tales is a book on fairy tales, and a book of fairy tales; academic research and creative writing are intermingled throughout the volume. Four out of our five editors in Unsettling Wonder have been involved in the production of New Fairy Tales. John Patrick Pazdziora has scrutinized storytellers and fools, Defne Cizakca has analysed the Ottoman fairy tale, Katherine Langrish has contributed with her story ‘Gnomes’, and Josh Richards has penned the poems ‘Galantha’ and ‘Dante’, as well as a study of Kenjiro Hata for the book. It will not be wrong to say readers who enjoy Unsettling Wonder will find a sister product in New Fairy Tales, one that delves into the depths of the genre and investigates it academically as well.
New Fairy Tales is divided into five thematic sections – Miniatures, Storytellers, Shadows and Reflections, Fairy Brides, and Fairy Tale Pedagogy – all of which contain stories as well as essays on their respective themes. While both fairy stories and academic work on fairy tales have a long tradition, no title to date had combined these two streaks under one heading. In this sense New Fairy Tales offers a unique contribution to the field.
Through the process essays featured in the book New Fairy Tales presents an opportunity to think academically about creative writing as well. We hope unveiling the inner workings of authors will inspire the reader to explore their own creativity. Reading fairy tales can lead us to write better fairy tales and the work featured in the collection has potential to inspire as it steers clear from the more classic features of the genre. New Fairy Tales also explores the field in a multicultural fashion. Hence the reader will find Japanese, Brazilian and American fairy tales side by side with academic work from Israel, Turkey, and Scotland. All in all we believe New Fairy Tales will give joy to anyone interested in interdisciplinary fairy tale scholarship and creative writing from distant lands.
In theory, there is nothing that stops one from putting an academic-creative-multicultural synthesis on fairy tales out into the world, but in reality such open minded publishers are often hard to find. This is why we owe a big thank you to John and Mary Granger of Unlocking Press for making New Fairy Tales possible, running with our wild idea, and supporting us all the way through this exciting process.
We leave you with a table of contents to arouse your imagination:
NEW FAIRY TALES: ESSAYS AND STORIES
John Patrick Pazdziora and Defne Çizakça, editors
Table of Contents
Introduction
John Patrick Pazdziora and Defne Çizakça
Chapter 0. Galantha
Joshua Richards
Part I. Minatures
Chapter 1. Glass, Bricks, Dust
Claire Massey
Chapter 2. Robert Herrick’s Fairy Epithalamium and Natural Religion
Jesse Sharpe
Chapter 3. Anti-Fairy Tale Taxidermy: The Animations of Tessa Farmer
Catriona McAra
Chapter 4. Gnomes
Katherine Langrish
Part II. Storytellers
Chapter 5. Are there Fairies Nowadays? Modern Fairy Tales in Hebrew
Hanna Livnat and Gaby Cohn
Chapter 6. Deciphering the Ottoman Fairy Tale: Tayyarzade throughout the Centuries
Defne Çizakça
Chapter 7. Cloud Catching in the Realm of the Drought King
Fiona Thackeray
Chapter 8. “On Fairy-stories” and Tolkien’s Elvish Tales
Christopher MacLachlan
Chapter 9. “Oh, You Wicked Storytellers!”
John Patrick Pazdziora
Part III. Shadows and Reflections
Chapter 10. A Prevailing Wind
Elizabeth Reeder
Chapter 11. Not for Children: The Development of Nihilism
in the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Colin Cavendish-Jones
Chapter 12. Radiant Mysteries: George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and
the Claritas of Fairy Tales
Daniel Gabelman
Chapter 13. The Land with No Stories
Eric M. Pazdziora
Part IV. Fairy Brides
Chapter 14. In the Midst of Metamorphosis: Yōko Tawada’s The Bridegroom Was a Dog
Mayako Murai
Chapter 15. A Gothic Fairy-Bride and the Fall: A Lecture on “The End of the World”
in Kenjirō Hata’s Hayate no Gotoku
Joshua Richards
Chapter 16. Dante
Joshua Richards
Part V. Fairy Tale Pedagogy
Chapter 17. Footsteps in the Classroom: “The Little Mermaid” and First-Year Writing
Kate Wolford
Chapter 18. Dragons in Hereville: Comics as a Vehicle for Fairy Tales
Orlando Dos Reis and Emily Midkiff
Chapter 19. Little Sparrow
Kirstin Zhang
Chapter 20. Beedle’s Moral Imagination
Travis Prinzi
Chapter 21. The Sea in the Hat
Tori Truslow
The interview did it, overcame my last reserve (small as it was) … I’ve ordered the book. Can’t wait to dig in.