My hardworking publicist at Watermark Publishingcalled my attention to this exciting retelling of classic international fairy tales. I wish I’d known about it when it first came out from Penguin in September, 2010, just a year before DON’T LOOK BACK was finally published (if you’ve not been to this site before, it’s my new collection of Hawaiian myths retold by contemporary writers). Now I can’t wait to get a copy and dig in.

Here are the details:
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction. Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.”

For those of you wondering if it’s okay to re-tell Hawaiian myths or fairy tales, check out this Slate piece by Libby Copeland. I love this quote, which is very applicable to my endeavor with DON’T LOOK BACK: 

“If altering fairy tales seems like politically correct white-washing, I would counter that it is the tradition of these folk tales to be changed by the era they’re in. We’re the fools if we treat them like gospel.”