Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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Kaaron Warren has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree, and Mistification) and four short story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Wal s, won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction and is shortlisted for nine Australian SF awards. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s “year’s best” anthologies.

You can find her at kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she tweets @KaaronWarren.

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The story “Tales That Fairies Tell” seemed like a natural for me.

The invitation to contribute to this anthology came as I was working on a collection of modern, feminist-centered fairy tales — The Queen, the Cambion and Seven Others: eight fairy tales generously illustrated with art by Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré. Recently published by Aqueduct Press, it also includes my essay, “A Secret History of Small Books,” tracing the path of literary fairy tales back to the late seventeenth century and Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, in which Puss—featured in this story—makes a memorable first appearance.

Richard Bowes

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Tales That Fairies Tell


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Richard Bowes





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“In the old world years ago,” said the Cat, “monarchs were plentiful, Mortals and Fairies co-mingled, dragons flew and animals spoke; witches, ogres, dragons, a host of magic creatures roamed the countryside, and a cat could stare at a king.”

The Cat spoke to Julian in the midst of a mad collage of a dream.

He’d had a few of these recently and would wake up trying to grab some of the details. This one began in his stepmother’s loveless suburban kitchen in New Hope. But instead of his father and stepmother with their respective despair and hostility he saw the figure everyone in New York (the Big Arena as it was called) desired or at least wanted to be seen with at that moment.

The artist/couturier Clemenso sat naked and looked right past Julian as everybody did. Clemenso’s Crisis Fashion Show was also in the dream. Models covered head to toe in bullet-resistant fabrics filed past his fridge.

There was more. But during it all, only the Cat—better known as Puss—spoke. He sat on the lap of the infamous and beautiful Veronessa who, in turn, sat under a basketball net suspended from a gold hoop at the gym-themed Park Avenue High and delivered his little speech.

Always after these dreams Julian would awake wanting to grab and preserve details and always they evaporated at his touch.

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? Tales That Fairies Tell ?

This time they stuck, even made a certain sense when Julian awoke in the dark. Not many hours before he had seen Puss and Veronessa in just that pose and place. Veronessa was tall, with a cloud of pale red hair. Her blog, Tales That Fairies Tell ( TTFT), was the hottest tip and scandal site in the Big Arena. It featured a running commentary on Fairy Godmothers, who had them and who didn’t.

Everyone said Puss was her pet. A few hinted it was the opposite way around. But none disputed that she wore clothes better than anyone else in the Arena and could command a spotlight. Her costume that evening at Park Avenue combined a lightweight bomb fragment-resistant jacket—its blue matched her eyes—and gray/

black city camouflage slacks.