I don’t mind a fairy tale, but even more than the traditional ones (a dubious and slippery term in itself), I love the re-imaginings and fracturings and reversals that have been published over the last few decades. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Troll’s Eye View, from 2009, with tales from the “villain’s” perspective - and 30 years before that Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber - and then there’s the sublime Sourdough and Other Stories, and all of its later connected parts by Angela Slatter, whose stories feel like they should be familiar but they’re not.
Today’s subscriber essay looks at what a fairy tale is, some of their history, and a suggestion for why humans still tell them.