Publisher Description

This "first rate anthology of reimagined fairy tales" (Locus Magazine) features an all-star lineup of award-winning and critically acclaimed writers.

Once upon a time. It's how so many of our most beloved stories start.

Fairy tales have dominated our cultural imagination for centuries. From the Brothers Grimm to the Countess d'Aulnoy, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Anderson, storytellers have crafted all sorts of tales that have always found a place in our hearts.

Now a new generation of storytellers has taken up the mantle that the masters created and shaped their stories into something startling and electrifying.

Packed with award-winning authors, this "fresh, diverse" (Library Journal) anthology explores an array of fairy tales in startling and innovative ways, in genres and settings both traditional and unusual, including science fiction, western, and post-apocalyptic as well as traditional fantasy and contemporary horror.

From the woods to the stars, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales takes readers on a journey at once unexpected and familiar, as a diverse group of writers explore some of our most beloved tales in new ways across genres and styles.

Contains stories by: Charlie Jane Anders, Aliette de Bodard, Amal El-mohtar, Jeffrey Ford, Max Gladstone, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Kat Howard, Stephen Graham Jones, Margo Lanagan, Marjorie Liu, Seanan McGuire, Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, Sofia Samatar, Karin Tidbeck, Catherynne M. Valente, and Genevieve Valentine.

Author Biography

Dominik Parisien is an editor, poet, and writer. He is the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Mythic Dream, Robots vs Fairies, and The Starlit Wood. Together their anthologies have won the Shirley Jackson Award and have been finalists for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Ignyte, and Locus Award. He also won the Hugo, British Fantasy, and Aurora Award for co-editing Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with Elsa Sjunneson. His debut poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers was published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

Navah Wolfe is a Hugo Award–nominated editor at Saga Press and the coeditor of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales and Mythic Dream, along with Dominik Parisien. She was previously an editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, where she worked on many bestselling books, including some that have won awards such as the Printz Honor, The Pura Belpré Award, The Pen/Faulkner Award, The Stonewall Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Schneider Family Award.

Review

"A classy, smart, and entertaining volume of stories put together with consummate care—and featuring the best and most exciting fantasy writers working in the field today." -- Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy
"The modern revival of fairy tale fiction for adults began in the 20th century (with the stories of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee), and The Starlit Wood is proof that the revival is still going strong. Editors Parisien and Wolfe have brought a wide range of writers together to blaze new trails through the dark of the woods. Whether you're passionate about fairy tales, like I am, or haven't read them since childhood, I recommend this excellent anthology. I simply loved it." -- Terri Windling, World Fantasy Award-winning editor of the Snow White, Blood Red series
"Lots of strange and wonderful goings-on in The Starlit Wood. Fairy tales you thought you'd left behind in childhood are back in some very poignant, sly and original versions that will touch the Wow in most readers." -- Jonathan Carroll, World Fantasy-Award winning author
"This anthology is consistent throughout, with well-crafted writing and a tantalizing taste of each author's unique journey into reimagining classic fairy tales for a new audience." * Booklist *
"A great pick for readers looking for a fresh, diverse spin on standard fairy tales." * Library Journal *
"A rich sample of what awaits us in the world of fairy tales...well worth making time to read." * Publishers Weekly *
"The best original fantasy anthology of the year." -- Jonathan Strahan, World Fantasy and Locus Award-winning editor
"A first rate anthology of reimagined fairy tales...quite lovely." * Locus Magazine *
"The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe is one of the best fantasy compilations of the year." * Locus Magazine *
"If you're a fan of fairy tale retellings, you'll probably want to pick up The Starlit Wood. [It] offers ample delights, both profound and humorous. It's an excellent entry into the retelling tradition, tuned for the current literary moment." * Locus Magazine *
"The table of contents alone reads like a who's who of fantasy authors...Highly recommended." * F&SF *
"An incredible, genre-blurring collection of retold fairy tales, featuring well-published luminaries and up-and-coming voices...Like those oft-told tales of old, The Starlit Wood is a volume readers will want to return to often, and it deserves a place on every bookshelf left wanting a touch of the magical." * B&N SciFi & Fantasy Blog *
"If you were ever fascinated by fairy tales as a child, if you have ever read a fairy tale to a child and watched their face light up, this is an anthology for you." -- The Little Red Reviewer

Review Quote

"A classy, smart, and entertaining volume of stories put together with consummate care--and featuring the best and most exciting fantasy writers working in the field today."

Excerpt from Book

The Starlit Wood IN THE DESERT LIKE A BONE Seanan McGuire he sky is the color of bleached bone, neither white nor yellow, but a creamy in-between shade that speaks death from one end of the horizon to the other. Under it, the desert, the sand little darker than that endless sky. Upon that desert, two riders on horseback. Coyote has the lead, has had it since the day he swung a scrap of a girl barely worth the patchwork cotton she was wrapped in onto the back of his horse. She has her own steed now, can choose her own way, but still she follows in his wake, close and quiet and biding her time. His shadow rides before the both of them, drawn bitter-black on the desert that stretches under the bone sky. As always, his face is concealed beneath the brim of his hat, and the gun at his hip glimmers with poisonous menace. He is a thin creature, is Coyote, raw of bone and furrowed of brow. The sun has burnt itself into him an inch at a time, turning his skin leathery and hard. Mosquitoes cannot pierce that skin, and fly away hungry when they come too close. Behind him on her swayback mare rides his red fox girl, her eyes bright as bullets and scanning the horizon for signs of death or danger. Her hat is brown leather, but to listen to the people who have seen her, it should be red as blood, red as a harlot''s corset, red as a rare, expensive apple stolen from an eastbound train. Her hair is the color of straw on a barroom floor, and her skin is tanned the color of the desert sand. She disappears, the fox girl does, whenever she slides from her horse and sets her feet to the ground. She is a child of this blasted, unforgiving land, and when she looks upon it, she sees a paradise, and not a waste at all. She knows the rock, and the shadow of the rock, and the flowers that bloom there. If there is danger here, it does not frighten her. The man in the black hat and the girl with hair the color of straw ride under the bone-colored sky, and no one knows from whence they ride, and no one watches them go. "Once upon a time," say the prairie harpies and the respectable housewives, the snake-oil saleswomen in their jewel-colored gowns and glittering cosmetics, the woodwitches and the wisewomen and the lost, "there was a little girl in a place where no little girl should be. Her mama was long gone to blood on her handkerchief and fire in her lungs, and her daddy was no daddy at all but a man who saw no difference between daughter and dog--and he was a man who''d beat his dog besides. They lived in a little house all the way to the cruel, civilized East, and everyone who knew him for a widower said ''wasn''t it fine'' when they sighed over the way he was bringing up his little girl, all by himself, without a woman''s hand to give him aid. That little girl had the best clothes and the best bread, and a cloak as red as the blood she''d seen on her mama''s lips before the man in the black wagon came to carry her mama away forever." That''s where the stories diverge. "She would have been a fine lady; she would have grown up draped in diamonds, wrapped in silks. She would have danced in the finest parlors, and if her daddy didn''t love her, she would have found a man who loved her more than the moon and the sun and the stars. But that bad wolf came in the night and gobbled her up, and she never got her dancing shoes, never got her debutante ball. She''s a ghost in the desert now, lost and lonely and brokenhearted as a bobcat in October, and if you see her, child, don''t you meet her eyes; don''t you let her lead you astray." So say the housewives and the rich women as they tuck their own dear daughters into bed. For them, she is a cautionary tale, a way to keep their children close, and who can blame them? Who can blame them in the least? "She would never have been a fine lady, as she had no grace for dancing; all her grace was in stillness and in silence, because those were the things her daddy prized, and so those were the things she learnt to please him. She would never have danced in the finest parlors, and who''s to say the man in the black wagon, the wolf of the west who was never a wolf at all, didn''t love her? What other reason could he have to come like a shadow in the night and sweep her away? Maybe she never got her diamonds, but she got the high desert stars, which shine far brighter. Maybe she never got her fine silks, but who would trade a single midnight breeze for all the silk in China? Her debutante ball was danced with jackrabbits and red-eyed lizards under the harvest moon, and if she never looked back, not even once, who can blame her? She''ll lead you astray as easy as breathing, but that''s no shame on her, or on you, for she never met a path she cared to follow. If you see her, child, don''t meet her eyes; I need you here with me." So say the snake-oil saleswomen and the frontier wives, and they''re as right, and as wrong, as anyone. The girl in the hat that isn''t red anywhere but in stories follows Coyote across the desert, and the stars are diamonds in her hair, and when she speaks--which is rare, for she trusts slow and warms slower--her voice carries the sound of the Atlantic, of deep woods and harsh snows and a climate she was born to but never belonged in. She could tell them another story, if she chose to, if she thought they''d listen. She could tell them about choices; about following because sometimes it was easier to track your prey when someone else blazes the trail. She could tell them all her choices have been her own, and will remain so: that if she had wanted someone else to make her choices for her, she would never have opened the window, never have left the path. She says none of these things. She has other matters to concern herself with, and other jobs to do. She builds the fire when they stop for the night, piles the kindling high and coaxes the flames toward the moon. Some nights, Coyote goes hunting, and she sits close to the warmth and listens to the howls in the far distance. Other nights, she fetches the rabbits and the grouse for their supper. Her hunts are silent, unlike his. They are no less effective. Her feet still leave dents in the desert sand, but he assures her that this, too, will pass; one day, she will move as light as the wind that blows between midnight and morning, leaving nothing behind. On that day, she will earn bullets for the guns she wears strapped to her sides. On that day, she will finally be free. Until then, she builds the fires when and where he tells her to, and she listens to him howl in the dark, and she tries to forget the house in the green world, where a man who claimed to know her had given bruises where he should have given kindness. She sleeps in the arms of the desert, and the stars keep watch above her. This day, the sun is high and harsh in the sky, beating down until even Coyote shields his eyes. The girl huddles under her hat and thinks longingly of caves and mountain springs, of places of safety and succor. All of them are hidden somewhere in the desert. She does not think this a contradiction. The desert is the greatest safety she knows. Coyote looks to her. A frown is on his lips, and there is worry in his eyes. "Are you well?" he asks. His voice is gunpowder and grace, as bone-bleached as the sky. "Just hot," she says. Her voice still belongs to a young woman, growing from childhood into womanhood. She might still find her way back to the green world, if she chose to seek it. That door is not yet closed to her. "We almost there?" Questions are small, skittering things, like mice. Answers are the predators that pounce on them. She has learned to unleash her questions cleverly, rather than risk them all being devoured before she can learn what she needs to know. "Close enough. You sure this is where we need to go?" Her nod is tight. New Woodbury is a small town built around a well that cuts all the way to the bones of the world, down to where the water waits. The people who live there think they''re going to thrive on that water. They don''t understand how fickle the desert is; they don''t know they''re being hunted. "I''m sure. There''s a man there. He says he''s looking for something he lost." Coyote looks at her, expression giving nothing away. "We have money. We could stop somewhere else. Rent a place, maybe get you some schooling before we finish the ride." "I''ve had enough schooling. I don''t want any more." "Bullets are good. Knowledge is better. You want to keep riding with me, you''re going to need both." The girl, who knows better than to cross the man she rides with, says nothing. But her eyes burn beneath the shadow of her hat, and Coyote feels a pang of pride. She''s growing up to be a proper wild thing, his little stolen pup. She''ll learn soon enough why he insists on things she thinks have no value, that to reject something, it must first be understood. They all learn, given time. That''s when they leave him. When they understand, and no longer need looking after; when they decide that it''s time to start looking after themselves. Distance has no meaning in the desert--not if the rider knows the way of things, the points of similarity between this and that, the places where the sky can fold. A man with a map, now, he''ll have a hundred miles of hard land to walk, and every inch of it resenting him for what he represents, for the way he pins it down. A lake that was once free to move from here to there, as migratory as a bird, finds

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