Why Vampires Won’t Die: they’re still relevant in literature

The recent trend of the undead (or living dead) has left the market saturated. We all know it. And although I enjoyed the Twilight books and half of the True Blood show, they rather ruined it for lukewarm vampire fans. In graduate school, I submitted my vampire novel as my thesis project and got vague…

Don’t Cross Tinkerbell by Lillian Csernica

The loving, helpful fairy godmother is largely a figment of Disney’s imagination. If you take a good look at the original fairy tales, fairy godmothers appear most often in stories written by the French précieuses, the best-known being Madame d’Aulnoy. These fairy godmothers are not the grandmotherly rescuer of Disney’s Cinderella, nor are they the…

Of Retellings by Rohit Sawant

There is no one right version of these fairy tales.

Beauty and the Beast: Welcome to the Dark Side by Lorraine Sharma Nelson

Love out of circumstance? Did Beauty live with the hand she was dealt?

A Grace Given in Sorrow: Stories as Soulcraft with Edward Cooke

Bruno Bettelheim has had a bad press. He’s been pilloried for extending the influence of nurture much further than we’re comfortable with. He was even so unfashionable as to believe we could all be nurtured by exposure to stories. In The Uses of Enchantment he puts it like this: Explaining to a child why a…