Welcome to the home of Nicole Kapise-Perkins, author, poet, reader, reviewer, tea drinker, believer in magick and myth, a dreamr that walks through darkly Gothic halls in sweeping skirts seeking mystery, meaning, her cat, and the occasional chocolate biscuit.
Summer Reading List 2015...almost
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I'm behind in formatting this summer's list, as last year I had it ready to go on Memorial Day. I will post it for real tonight (I hope!) but for now, here's a list of some faboo-sounding titles as reviewed by Graham Joyce via The Guardian:
Graham Joyce's top 10 fairy fictions
From Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus to Alan Garner's The Owl Service, Graham Joyce chooses his favourite books in which the Fair Folk find themselves in fresh landscapes
Still from the film Pan's Labyrinth Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc/PR
I'm very careful to avoid the "F" word. They don't like it. And anyway, I've stepped away from the obvious "retelling of fairytale" candidates. Recasting fairytales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of "fairy" is imported as a delicate spice. In these fictions, magical and impossible content tends to be offered in a more naturalistic mode of storytelling. The effect for the reader is that of riding a shuttle between natural scepticism and open credulity. If there were a film paradigm it would start with Pan's Labyrinth. All of these authors are rule-breakers. I'd call them "fantasists" except that it's a word with an unstable currency; but a sense of awe and dislocation is upheld here, and a new way of knowing is always the prize.
Here's my top 10 in no particular order.
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.
2. The Faery Handbag by Kelly Link
To be found in the collection Pretty Monsters. Throw away everything you think you know about short stories and read Kelly Link: her stories get bigger each time you read them. You think you know what's in the bag, but you don't. The rhythms of Link's storytelling evoke some very old cadence patterns, but always operate in a modern idiom. I don't always know what her stories mean, but I always know that they are a delight.
Inspired by Yeats's poem about the legend of the changelings, The Stolen Child also owes a debt to JM Barrie's Peter Pan, another fairy story that was not about fairies at all but about the loss of imagination and about growing up. On the surface, a clever novel about some rather degenerate Fair Folk. But while our backs are turned the author performs a switch and delivers a luminous novel about our humanity.
Her collection The Bloody Chamber might be more obvious but some of those stories come under the re-telling category. Nights at the Circus is more anarchic and the chief protagonist is a peroxide blonde with wings called Fevvers, who was hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents. Yes, her wings are a metaphor but yes, her wings are real. Another landmark novel shunned by the Man Booker judges because it lacked, well, gravity. Many traditional fairytales are invoked and overturned throughout the novel.
The wildly inventive Midlands landscape poet won prizes for this brilliant collection. Goodwin experiments with ambient sound or acoustic context for recording his poems, many of which reference fairytales, or furry tales as the poet calls them.
This is a novel that draws on the great tradition of European fairytales but which offers us a shimmering romance for our modern world. A luminous work, about a girl's transformation into glass.
Garner is one of the very greatest fantasy writers in the English language, though I admit that the categorisations of his work as "Children's" or "Fantasy" are meaningless. The Owl Service is set in Wales, and uses as its basis a story from the mediaeval Welsh epic, the Mabinogion. Published in 1967, in 2007 The Owl Service was selected by judges of the Carnegie Medal for children's literature as one of the 10 most important children's novels of the past 70 years. Really, I could pick anything by this writer.
This is a young adult novel, but nevertheless, the book won the annual Mythopoeic Society Award for Adult Literature in 1993. It combines the Sleeping Beauty story with the Holocaust and themes of homosexuality. That's right. Got it banned somewhere in the American Midwest. Constantly surprises as the standard images of the tale of Sleeping Beauty dissolve into the realities of life under the Nazis.
A clever reversal of the feral-child story, first published in Black Static magazine, a terrific venue for this kind of writing. Joel Lane is another gem of a short-storyist. The narrator pursues some kind of fox-being, a creature that possesses one person after another, always travelling.
10. Sweet Bride by Kate Rusby
Can we have a song? Yes, let's break the rules and finish on a song. The Barnsley Nightingale singing her own composition. This song is an extraordinary tale of dangerous seduction and it calls on a pan-European tradition of willing abduction into the world of the Other.
(I loved Ali Shaw's The Girl With Glass Feet, and own Jane Yolen's Briar Rose. Both are exquisitely delivered stories in the faerie-tale tradition.)
Hypatia's Heritage by Margaret Alic This was a very good read, slightly (okay, a lot) over my head as far as some of the information presented goes, but a book that focuses on brilliant women in science and mathematics in history? Outstanding. his is the kind of book I would pass on to my daughter if she enjoyed books as much as I do. Parents, or anyone with a special young lady in your life, especially one interested in the sciences, pass this book along to her. Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830 to 1860 by Thomas Dublin I love reading collections of letters and old diaries and journals; the authentic view of another place and time is fascinating to me, especially when it pertains to the time period that interests me most, i.e, the nineteenth century. The women that wrote these letters were educated as well as their time allowed, yet none of them come across as ignorant or uninformed. They are vibrant, lively, sparking with life and breath. Is the subject m...
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