Two new TV shows Once Upon a Time and Grimm have garnered a huge and enthusiastic audience.
Once Upon A Time is the story of how an Evil Queen has cursed her fairytale subjects. They are imprisoned with new identities and contemporary lives in Storybrooke, clueless about their true selves. So Jiminy Cricket is the town shrink, Snow White is a school teacher, Rumpelstiltskin the owner of an antique shop. The show presents the back story from Fairy Tale Land and then switches to the present day focusing on how and when the characters will "remember" their enchanted pasts.
Grimm is the story of a homicide detective NIck Burkhardt, who is the last in a long line of Grimms who protect humans from the evil creatures who co-exist in our world disguised as humans.
My guess is that this fascination with a fairytales is a spin-off/subset of the tremendously popular paranormal/urban fantasy genres.
So if you like these shows--here are some book suggestions in no particular order.
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer. Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, this anthology collects 40 new "retellings" by contemporary writers.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter. A collection of dark, sensual and fantastic stories inspired by the fairy tales and legends of Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves and more.
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue. 13 interconnected revisionist fairy tales with a feminist slant about power, transformation and choosing one own's path.
White as Snow by Tanith Lee. A dark reworking of the Snow White story.
Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. Twelve year old David, mourning the death of his mother, journeys to a land populated by heroes and monsters.
Fables Volume 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham. The first volume of an award winning comic book series in which the inhabitants of folklore have been forced into exile in modern day New York disguised as normal citizens.
Teen possibilities include:
Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth Bunce. A teen adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin.
Beastly by Alex Flinn. A spinoff of Beauty and the Beast.
Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman. An ordinary girl is a page for a lending library of objects which includes the Grimm Collection but magic mirrors and seven league boots are starting to disappear.
Cloaked in Red by Vivian Vande Velde. Eight humorous parodies of the Little Red Riding Hood tale.
For a visual treat, check out Spectrum 18: the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art edited by Cathy Fenner.
If you are curious about the original stories, Taschen has just released a gorgeous compilation, The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm edited by Noel Daniel.
