The best fairy tales for adults

I just discovered this book and want to teach it in every one of my classes! Folk is a series of stories about the villagers in a tiny, closed-off island filled with strange rituals and a cacophony of alliances and grudges. Her language is simply thrilling, and the fairy tales are shocking in all different ways. We hear a different perspective in each story, so the book results in a fairy tale about how small communities work and what the ‘folk’ in them must do—and believe—in order to get along.  

This book is almost too beautiful for words, and reading it you feel like you are falling into a haunted magic mirror where identity and race are explored alongside a host of deep simmering emotions: anger and forgiveness, fear and vanity. A sort of dizzying intergenerational retake on Snow White.

Russell has written many books that traffic in underworlds, weirdness, and magic, but for me this book—her first—takes the cake. Written when the author was just twenty-five, St. Lucy’s Home is a collection of magical coming-of-age stories—my favorite one features the children of werewolves who are sent to a rigid school with impossible rules. Russell is a poet at the sentence level—her verbs constantly do acrobatics! In these stories, she portrays adolescence as a sort of sieve in which we must leave all our wonderful weirdness behind in order to become adults.

Seriously, no list of adult fairy tales can be complete without this one. One of the only instances where the movie and the book are equally delightful, in endearing and different ways. The movie—which I can quote in its entirety (true fact)—is more romantic than the book. The book is snarky and hilarious, a fairy tale that makes fun of fairy tales, while also hinting at why we as humans perennially need them.

A gorgeous underdog story about an immortal who is never properly valued by her extensive, dysfunctional family. All the classic elements of memoir exist in this novel—accepting what she must, changing what she can about the life she is born into—but with the fascinating backdrop of living a life as an exiled goddess with a knack for magic.