Ten books that will change how you think about fairy tales

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young adult Unstoppable trilogy: Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards.

In 2016 at Gizmondo she tagged ten books that will change how you see the fairy tale, including:

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Marina Warner is one of the great experts on fairy tales, and in this book she sets out to create a simple map of the territory, ranging from the familiar to the unknown. Warner covers the diversity and strangeness of fairy tales, as well as explaining how they came to be sanitized and bowdlerized for young audiences. And she looks at how the same stories crossed borders and cultures, changing themselves to adapt to new contexts while proving robust and unkillable. The Guardian calls this book “wide-ranging and wonderful,” and “a winning exploration of the scope and power of fairy stories.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue