Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-bending memoir is a formally dazzling and emotionally acute testimony of an abusive queer relationship.
Read moreOn Loving Monsters and The Human Condition
Description: A fox headed woman holds surgical scissors like a knife in front of the darkened open door way that reveals the story collection title. Book Cover of Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro. Art by Stephen Mackey. Jacket Design by Vince Haig.
A Review of the excellent Sing Your Sadness Deep by British Fantasy Award winner and Shirley Jackson Award finalist Laura Mauro.
Read moreKelly Link and the Dilemma of Wishes
In her Pulitzer Prize nominated collection, Get in Trouble, Link delves into the delights and perils of being granted your heart’s desire.
Read more"This House of Wounds" by Georgina Bruce: A Review
The beautiful and utterly dangerous cover art for This House of Wounds by Georgina Bruce. Original artwork by Catrin Welz-Stein, jacket design by Vince Haig. A beautifully dressed pale white woman wearing a masquerade mask, her hair adorned with fancy flowers, face serene and rib cage exposed and filled with flowers.
If you are interested in the themes of mirrors and mothers, bodies as machines, daughters and madness, flowers and blood, then Georgina Bruce’s debut story collection is for you!
Read moreWe Can't Outrun Pain: Interview with Priya Sharma
Fiction Unbound’s Gemma Webster chats with UK writer Priya Sharma.
Read more"The Hazel Wood": Interrogating the European Fairy Tale
Melissa Albert’s debut novel cuts to the bone of European fairy tales to find the essence of nightmares: horrors that are both seductive and disturbing.
Read moreField Notes from Lit Fest: Speculative Writing in Denver
Our editors share their thoughts on Lit Fest 2018 in Denver.
Read moreThe Fairy Tales of Helen Oyeyemi: A Closer Look at "Is Your Blood as Red as This"
Helen Oyeyemi proving once again that she is a magical fairy tale spinner with her short story collection, What is Not Yours is Not Yours.
Read moreLegacies of Loss in Ann Claycomb's The Mermaid's Daughter
Fiction Unbound reviews Ann Claycomb's debut novel The Mermaid's Daughter
Read moreCross-Cultural Fables: A Field Report from Bhutan
Lisa Mahoney looks for common themes in Bhutanese folktales and finds... the phallus town.
Read moreOf Fairy Tales & Fire: Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing"
Fairy tale elements and symbolism in Yaa Gyasi's debut, Homegoing
Read moreThe Last Days of Magic: Come for the Fairies, Stay for the Research
A decentralized recounting of the English and Catholic conquest of Ireland and its faeries, Celts, and native religions as told through the stories of dozens of characters.
Read moreThe Future of the Princess: Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles
In The Lunar Chronicles, Marissa Meyer re-imagines four classic princesses and their associated princes. With the five-book series now complete, it's time to unpack these princesses and see what patterns, new and old, have emerged in their heroic journeys.
Read moreThe Unbearable Lightness of Undermajordomo Minor
Patrick deWitt uses the tropes of the fairy tale to stumble into the tropes of the postmodern novel.
Read moreCorruption & Control: Naomi Novik's Uprooted
Naomi Novik's Uprooted
Questions of corruption and its ability to change and control us take center stage in Naomi Novik's latest, Uprooted, which reminds us how easy it can be to forget to see the (evil) forest for the (evil) trees.
Read moreDown the Rabbit Hole
Make your moments of distraction more satisfying with this week's rabbit hole of speculative news, interviews and fiction.
Read moreRevive the Grendel’s-Mother/Female-Warrior/Mother Archetype, Please!
After reading Sarah Boxer's article "Why are all the Cartoon Mothers Dead?" in The Atlantic, Fiction Unbound urges authors of speculative fiction to break the pattern of orphans and buddy-buddy fathers. Bring on the power moms!
Read moreThe Power to Choose: Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper & The Spindle
Neil Gaiman dreams up a new version of the classic Sleeping Beauty story in his The Sleeper and the Spindle, illustrated by Chris Riddell.
The Sleeper & the Spindle is a richly illustrated modern fairy tale that blends the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White into an almost unrecognizable retelling. Neil Gaiman has tackled the subject of sleeping and dreams before, but what he hasn’t done previously, is concoct a fairy tale retelling that speaks directly to children as much as adults, with veiled Grimm-like warnings about the trouble with misbehaving. In this retelling, though, the ones misbehaving are the elders.
Frog Princesses & Other Oddities in New Fairy Tale Collection
A new collection of recently re-discovered fairy tales compiled by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth has been translated by Maria Tatar and published by Penguin. Prepare to have the evil step-mother trope trampled on with an iron dancing shoe, worn by a man with golden locks.
Read moreThe Rapunzel Complex
Amanda Baldeneaux, CS Peterson and CH Lips got together to discuss recent retellings of the Rapunzel story and muse about why so many women get locked in towers when we write fantasy.
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