Kate Bernheimer
Kate Bernheimer is an author, fairy-tale scholar, and editor who lives in Tucson and is a professor at the University of Arizona. Her latest book, a novel entitled "The Lion's Den," will debut at the festival.
A collection entitled "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me" has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bernheimer is the founding editor of the award-winning literary journal, Fairy Tale Review.
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Books:
The Lion's Den
A Novel
Fiction / Literature
Little Brown
March 2027
ISBN 9780316599078
hardcover, 0 pages
For readers of Susan Choi and Paul Murray: In the haunted wilderness that is a 1980s suburban high school, two teenage girls forge a life-changing connection as they navigate the monstrous challenge of growing up.
Hope Rothbein and Marty Morris are high school best friends, existing on the cusp of adulthood, a place where imagination and reality jockey for control.Marty is a dedicated ballerina struggling in school and at home; Hope is straight-A student with a poet’s heart and a secret: her beloved mother Elaine, a once-celebrated artist, is in and out of the state mental hospital. Elaine has a secret of her own: she is at work on a new series of portraits featuring Hope and Marty that are based on old fairy tales, in an attempt to reclaim her identity as an artist.
The girls find reprieve in their shared love of dance and poetry and in the elaborate feminist rituals they stage in the forest near their homes, but standing in their way are the adults tasked with their education. From the monsterish driver’s ed instructor to the cult leader of an English teacher, these real-life ogres treat the student body with exasperation and relentless indifference. As Hope and Marty confront the dangerous world they are growing up into, they must keep their wits about them, even as the events of their lives careen them toward an increasingly perilous cliff.
Written with the fantastical sensibility of a modern fairy tale and the perfectly observed detail of a classic campus novel, The Lion’s Den is a lyrical and profoundly original evocation of young friendship and the uncanny other worlds that exist inside two vibrant teenage minds. More/less
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales
Fiction / Literature
Anchor
March 1998
ISBN 9780385486811
Paperback, 376 pages
New edition (revised and expanded) available 8/13/02.Fairy tales are one of the most enduring forms of literature, their plots retold and characters reimagined for centuries.
In this elegant and thought-provoking collection of original essays, Kate Bernheimer brings together twenty-eight leading women writers to discuss how these stories helped shape their imaginations, their craft, and our culture. In poetic narratives, personal histories, and penetrating commentary, the assembled authors bare their soul and challenge received wisdom. Eclectic and wide-ranging, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is essential reading for anyone who has ever been bewitched by the strange and fanciful realm of fairy tales.Contributors include: Alice Adams, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Rosellen Brown, A. S. Byatt, Kathryn Davis, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Deborah Eisenberg, Maria Flook, Patricia Foster, Vivian Gornick, Lucy Grealy, bell hooks, Fanny Howe, Fern Kupfer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carole Maso, Jane Miller, Lydia Millet, Joyce Carol Oates, Connie Porter, Francine Prose, Linda Gray Sexton, Midori Snyder, Fay Weldon, Joy Williams, Terri Windling. More/less
