Thursday, June 28, 2012

Top 10 fairy fictions

Graham Joyce, a winner of the O. Henry Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, lives in Leicester, England, with his family. His books include The Silent Land, Smoking Poppy, Indigo (a New York Times Notable Book of 2000), The Tooth Fairy (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998), and Requiem, among others. His new novel is Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

For the Guardian, he named his ten "favourite books in which the Fair Folk find themselves in fresh landscapes," including:
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by AS Byatt

Stuffed with marvels. Byatt doesn't re-tell fairytales, she creates her own and endows them with intelligent intention and original power. The heroine of the title story, Dr Gillian Perholt, is a scholar and a decoder of stories, and the narrative nests inside that detail. But it's not all cerebral fun. This story has a very large genie endowed with impressive and stinky genitals.
Read about another entry on Joyce's list.

The Page 69 Test: Graham Joyce'sSome Kind of Fairy Tale.

--Marshal Zeringue