I haven’t finished revisiting Sleeping Beauty. As a faerie tale, that one is rife with inherent difficulties. After all, the world doesn’t stop just because one person is asleep.

Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That’s another kind of prison.It’s not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my...

a dense wall of greenery bordered it, …an impenetrable barrier of oaks, evergreen shrubs, blackberry that somehow resisted the frost, and thorns. In the defense department, the witches would make Sleeping Beauty’s evil witch weep...

This is not the way these tales end,” Calliope said firmly.”This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales,” Amatus said, “but since ours is not yet told, we cannot...

When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body.Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits,...

I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.

Sometimes,’ Beauty said softly, sipping from her silver goblet, ‘everyone needs to let the beast inside them out for a while’. She laughed, a sound like a waterfall meeting the sea and more glitter escaped...

I’ll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty… were not perfect in the beginning. It’s only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the...

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ‘the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.