Oddly Modern Fairy Tales¹³

Jack Zipes, Series Editor

Oddly Modern Fairy Tales is a series dedicated to publishing unusual literary fairy tales produced mainly during the first half of the twentieth century. International in scope, the series includes new translations, surprising and unexpected tales by well-known writers and artists, and uncanny stories by gifted yet neglected authors. Postmodern before their time, the tales in Oddly Modern Fairy Tales transformed the genre and still strike a chord.

The Midnight Washerwoman and Other Tales of Lower Brittany Francois-Marie Luzel
In the late nineteenth century, the folklorist François-Marie Luzel spent countless winter evenings listening to stories told by his neighbors, local Breton farmers and villagers. At these social gatherings, known as veillées, Luzel...
The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales Edited by Juwen Zhang
The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales brings together forty-two magical Chinese tales, most appearing for the first time in English. These stories have been carefully selected from more than a thousand originally published...
The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales
The Pomegranates and Other Modern Italian Fairy Tales presents twenty magical stories published between 1875 and 1914, following Italy’s political unification. In those decades of political and social change, folklorists collected...
The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales Hermynia Zur Mühlen
Edited by Jack Zipes
Translated by Jack Zipes
Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883–1951), one of the twentieth century’s great political writers, was not seemingly destined for a revolutionary, unconventional literary career. Born in Vienna to an aristocratic Catholic family, Zur Mühlen...
Told Again: Old Tales Told Again Walter de la Mare
Originally published in 1927, Told Again is an enchanting collection of elegant fairy tales, showcasing the formidable talents of Walter de la Mare, one of the most celebrated writers of children’s literature during the first half of...
The Fourth Pig Naomi Mitchison
The Fourth Pig, originally published in 1936, is a wide-ranging collection of fairy tales, poems, and ballads that reflect the hopes and forebodings of their era but also resonate with those of today. From a retelling of “Hansel and...
Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn
Edited by Andrei Codrescu
Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was one of the nineteenth century’s best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Hearn was a true prodigy and...
Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition Edited by Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert
The wolf is tricked by Red Riding Hood into strangling her grandmother and is subsequently arrested. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella do not live happily ever after. And the fairies are saucy, angry, and capricious. Fairy Tales for the...
Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain Edited by Michael Rosen
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unique tales inspired by traditional literary forms appeared frequently in socialist-leaning British periodicals, such as the Clarion, Labour Leader, and Social Democrat. Based on...
Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men: Political Fairy Tales of Édouard Laboulaye Édouard Laboulaye
Édouard Laboulaye (1811–1883), one of nineteenth-century France’s most prominent politicians and an instrumental figure in establishing the Statue of Liberty, was also a prolific writer of fairy tales. Smack-Bam, or The Art of...
Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales Kurt Schwitters
Translated by Jack Zipes
Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and...
The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales Béla Balázs
A man is changed into a flea and must bring his future parents together in order to become human again. A woman convinces a river god to cure her sick son, but the remedy has mixed consequences. A young man must choose whether to be...
The Fairies Return: Or, New Tales for Old Edited by Maria Tatar
Originally issued in 1934, The Fairies Return was the first collection of modernist fairy tales ever published in England, and it marked the arrival of a satirical classic that has never been surpassed. Even today, this reimagining of...