Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

Her sisters tried an intervention, tried to teach her the lighter side of magic: how to cause the lame to dance, milk to spring from a maiden’s breast. Tried to insert her as the muse in amusing histories.

But as with everything Malara did, things always turned to the worst.

And there it could have stood, with her sisters loving her and wishing to help. With them worrying over her, thinking she’d been damaged somehow, that none of this was her fault.

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? Jane Yolen ?

But when at last they understood how much she reveled in her talent for cursing, even her sisters left her alone.

And that is when she found me and made the last of her curses.

O acorn, that you never had known spring. O oak, that you never had grown limbs. O limbs, that you never were sawn, planed, bended, and bowed. O wheel, that you were never made.

Malara found me in a byre, set aside after a lifetime of use. Her fingers started me awhirl again and I was pleased to be found useful.

She tested the spindle, and I was delighted to feel magic. She wound wool through all my parts, and I was thrilled to be spinning anew.

I thought her no more then a solitary crone, for so she presented herself, as if touched by age, humped with it. We limped up to the forbidden tower.

There was such a sense of wonder in her touch I ignored the darkness in it. Stupid old oak.

There was warning in her songs. I thought them full of beauty.

Foolish acorn child.

I dreamed that I might be the one to spin straw into gold. Silly old wheel.

Instead of slowing my rotation, instead of tangling the yarn, I held my spindle upright. My wheel made many smooth turnings. I was addled with work, in love with production.

I did not see the world coming to an end.

There was a knock on the door.

A girl fair as morning entered, the sun-gold in her hair all the riches I was ever to see.

“Grandmother,” she said to the witch. “I am here for my lesson.”

Malara smiled and handed her the spindle.

It pierced her finger and all the world spun down.

So why is it I, not the witch, being put to the flame?

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? The Spinning Wheel’s Tale ?

Jane Yolen, author of over eighty-five original fairy tales, and over 335 books, is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America— though she wonders (not entirely idly) whether she should really be called the “Hans Jewish Andersen of America.” She has written a lot of fairy tale poetry as well, and has been named both Grand Master of the World Fantasy Convention and Grand Master of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has won two Nebulas for her short stories, and a bunch of other awards, including six honorary doctorates. One of her awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set her good coat on fire, a warning about faunching after shiny things that she has not forgotten.

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My lovely green-eyed Mother told me many traditional fairy tales when I was an infant, following these up with her own wily re tellings.

The influence of these can be seen in my children’s collection ( Princess Hynchatti) published in the 1970s but written by me in the 1960s. In these stories are such things as a prince who falls in love with the witch helping him to win the difficult, task-setting princess, and the prince who drives a swan nearly crazy by repeatedly kissing it—wrongly—sure it is a princess under a spell . . .

Evidently such magical twists still obsess me.

Tanith Lee

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Below the Sun Beneath


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Tanith Lee





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Life drove him into death, so it had seemed. It was the choice between dying—or living and causing death, to be corpse or corpse-maker. Perhaps Death’s own dilemma.