10 fairy tales written especially for adults

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

From rethinking stories about princesses to a vampire novel and a post-apocalyptic parable.

If you think that fairy tales are written exclusively for children, we hasten to reassure you. Authors sometimes deliberately choose this folklore genre in order to convey their thoughts and views in the most vivid and intelligible way. We have collected 10 "adult" fairy tales that everyone should read. We promise they will captivate you!

1. "The Most Expensive Product", Jean-Claude Grumbert

The French playwright Jean-Claude Grumbert wrote the parable about life and death, great hope and the gift of fate. This is the story of a child thrown from a freight train into the family of a poor woodcutter and his wife. The heroes do not know that the train was not carrying goods at all - people sentenced to death were traveling in it to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Grumbert writes an ingenuous story about how kindness, love and compassion save one from cruelty, and also about the fact that even in a dark forest it is sometimes not as scary as when surrounded by people.

2. "Cinderella and the Glass Ceiling" by Laura Lane and Ellen Hawn

Comedians Laura Lane and Ellen Hawn, famous for the thematic show Femme Fairy Tales, decided to update children's fairy tales and examine familiar stories through the prism of a fem-agenda. They took 12 plots, mostly familiar from Disney films, and put them in a new way.

Rapunzel decides for herself what beauty standards to meet, Mulan is struggling with the gender pay gap, and Cinderella does not agree to pretend to be who she is not. The result is caustic, funny and modern stories - though not at all for children.

3. "Beauty is grief", Eka Kurniavan

Indonesian writer Eka Kurniavan created his "One Hundred Years of Solitude" - or rather, the female version of this novel. Fascinatingly beautiful, colorful and cruel. The plot revolves around Devi Ayu, the most famous prostitute in the fictional city of Halimunda, and her four daughters.

Three children are born as beautiful as their mother. And when Devi Ayu becomes pregnant for the fourth time, the only thing she prays for is that the child will be born ugly, because beauty for a woman in the patriarchal world is grief. Devi Ayu dies without seeing her daughter. And 20 years later, she resurrects to see if everything is in order with her family and how her fourth daughter lives, ironically called Beauty.

4. "Kys", Tatiana Tolstaya

The novel "Kys" by Tatiana Tolstoy takes place in post-apocalyptic Moscow, in a society of mutated people and animals. Tolstaya invents a bizarre language in which neologisms coexist with archaisms and dialectisms, and writes an encyclopedia of Russian life - a terrible modern tale about a world in which we can all find ourselves.

5. "Two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights," Salman Rushdie

Almost any book by Salman Rushdie could be on this list - he is a master at coming up with fairy tales for adults. His writing is more complex than it sounds: Rushdie is a philosopher, not just a storyteller.

The title of the book refers us to the eastern Thousand and One Nights. Rushdie himself reincarnates as Scheherazade and tells an amazing story about how the princess of the genies fell in love with a man, the philosopher Ibn Rushd, and gave birth to children from him. And everything would have gone well, but beautiful love ended, and after years a war began between jinn and people. As usual, Rushdie is concerned not only with the sentimental side of the issue, but also with the political one: how the struggle for power will end.

6. "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu

Sheridan le Fanu published the story of the forbidden passion of a vampire for mortals 25 years before Bram Stoker - back in 1872. Its main characters are two women: the bloodsucker Carmilla and Laura, the daughter of a wealthy English widower. Carmilla has been visiting Laura since childhood, visiting her for the first time at the age of six. When a young lady turns 18, a vampire appears in her house in the form of a girl of the same age. They become friends, but Carmilla has strange feelings for Laura - an animal attraction, a destructive passion. And the longer Carmilla is with Laura, the weaker she becomes.

7. "Drunken Birds, Funny Wolves", Evgeny Babushkin

Evgeny Babushkin is a young Russian prose writer and journalist. His "Drunken Birds, Happy Wolves" is a collection of scary tales about the modern absurd world. Babushkin presents these stories as if he is trying to "speak" reality so that it becomes even a little kinder. In his world live eccentrics and bores, women who are loved "for their beauty", and men - masters of body kit. By the way, the book was shortlisted for the prestigious Andrei Belyi literary prize.

8. Binder by Bridget Collins

In the fantasy world of Bridget Collins, you can erase bad or unwanted memories by simply turning them into a book. Bookbinders are engaged in melting memory into volumes of letters - they listen to stories and transfer them to pages.

The main character Emmett Farmer becomes a student of the old bookbinder Seredith. Gradually he masters the skill, but then it turns out that he himself was once "intertwined". Collins' work gets a poignant sound thanks to a romantic story - the forbidden love of two young men, opposition to parents and a lack of understanding of society.

9. "Finist is a clear falcon", Andrey Rubanov

The novel by Andrey Rubanov is based on the well-known Russian folk tale about the young werewolf Finiste and the girl Marya, who went to look for her lover far away. She is not afraid of difficulties, she is ready to wear down 100 pairs of iron boots and risk her life more than once, just to save Finist. If you are interested in getting to know modern Slavic fantasy, this is it.

10. "Tales of Old Vilnius", Max Fry

A collection of magical stories from the author of the Echo universe. Everything in Fairy Tales of Old Vilnius fascinates: the atmosphere, characters and events. Max Fry, like a sorceress, immerses the reader in the world of everyday magic, where nothing is impossible.

A total of seven volumes of "Fairy Tales" were published, and the continuation of the cycle was the trilogy "The Heavy Light of Courtaine".

gives new users 14 days of premium subscription with a promotional code MARCH2021plus a 25% discount on MyBook premium subscriptions for 1 or 3 months. The code must be redeemed by March 31, 2021.