Once there was a girl who lived in a castle. The castle was inside a museum. When children visited, they'd press against the glass globe in which the castle sat, to glimpse the tiny girl. But when they went home, the girl was lonely. Then one day, she had an idea! What if you hung a picture of yourself inside the castle inside the museum, inside this book? Then you'd able to keep the girl company. Reminiscent of "The Lady of Shalot," here is an original fairy tale that feels like a dream--haunting, beautiful, and completely unforgettable.

"Each of these spare and elegant tales rings like a bell in your head. memorable, original, and not much like anything you've read."—Karen Joy Fowler“A strange and enchanting book, written in crisp, winning sentences; each story begs to be read aloud and savored.”—Aimee Bender"Horse, Flower, Bird rests uneasily between the intersection of fantasy and reality, dreaming and wakefulness, and the sacred and profane. Like a series of beautiful but troubling dreams, this book will linger long in the memory. Kate Bernheimer is reinventing the fairy tale."—Peter Buck, R.E.M.In Kate Bernheimer's familiar and spare—yet wondrous—world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger's daughter befriends a tulip bulb, and sisters explore cycles of love and violence by reenacting scenes from Star Wars.Enthralling, subtle, and poetic, this collection takes readers back...

The fairy tale lives again in this book of forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction. Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.

Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling *My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.*Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse—his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions.Aimee Bender retells the myth of the Titans.Madeline Miller retells the myth of Galatea.Kevin Wilson retells the myth of Phaeton, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Emma Straub and Peter Straub retell the myth of Persephone.Heidi Julavits retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice.Ron Currie, Jr. retells the myth of Dedalus.Maile Meloy retells the myth of Demeter.Zachary Mason retells the myth of Narcissus.Joy Williams retells the myth of Argos, Odysseus’ dog.If “xo” signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbye to an old way of mythmaking. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, a squid who falls in love with the sun, and a girl who gives birth to cubs, here are extravagantly imagined, bracingly contemporary stories, heralding a new beginning for one of the world’s oldest literary traditions.