Kissing the Witch cover art

Kissing the Witch

Old Tales in New Skins

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Kissing the Witch

By: Emma Donoghue
Narrated by: Maggie Mash
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About this listen

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time.

Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.

Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire.

©1993 Emma Donoghue (P)2014 Audible, Ltd Anthologies & Short Stories Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magic Short Stories

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Critic reviews

"Stunning. " ( The Boston Globe)
"Sophisticated, provocative, and bracing. " ( The New York Times Book Review)
"A masterful, gorgeous, and wickedly well written book." (Francesca Lia Block, author of Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books)
"These tales are revolutionary." ( The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle)
All stars
Most relevant
I started this book just after re-r ading The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter). I cherished that book as a feminist landmark when I read it in college. I only wish we had been given this jewel to go along with it.
As well as a rehabilitation for all those villainous fairytale witches some of us always identified more with, the structure and style of this interwoven collection is masterful. Stories nested within one another like matrioshka dolls, in homage to classic folk-tale structure of "What happened when the storyteller ran out of stories". The voice in each of the 13 tales is distinctive and compassionate, giving first-person access to these archetypal women's lives.

The queer fairytales you didn’t know you needed

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none of the retold fairy tales (but one so far) comes to conclusion, it just sidetracked to another one and another one, it's really annoying and frustrating
I'm still trying to finish it in hope it's going to provide some closures and answers but it's getting more irritating with every chapter, considering abandoning it all together...

irritating

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This was really good. I expected some retelling, short stories, maybe gender reverses or something like that. Did not expect a total rewrite of certain stories, or the continuation, giving us the origin stories only after we know what they became. Beautiful idea and great execution

Wow

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