What is Reddit's opinion of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales?

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I'm gonna take a different route here and recommend books that cover a lot of styles as opposed to books that are actually about writing. I kept this one from my Intro to Fiction class, just because it shows how many new stories you can make out of ones you already know (in this case, classic fairy tales). Collections like that can give you some pretty good ideas for developing your own style :)

Edit: Long day. I no do words good.

>I love fairy tales and the storyteller by the henson company. Do you have a favorite fairytale from that series?

Unfortunately, I have never seen The Storyteller series, so I can't definitively say either way, but after perusing the Wiki page I can say that I've always held a soft spot for "The Story of the Boy Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was" and "The Six Swans" is one of my favorite tales generally, so probably those. Also sidenote: I am living for the fact that they apparently did a tale that has parallels to The Death of Koschei the Deathless, which is such an incredibly bonkers tale and is so incredibly indicative of the madness that is Eastern European/Russian fairy tales.

> Mine is the soldier and death. It makes me awestruck and weepy at the grand scale of a peasents life. Can you talk more about its significance or how old that story is.

That one is apparently dually inspired by a Russian folktale and Godfather Death, which is a super interesting tale type. I don't really have many details about its' significance or how old the story is, because that's not my specialty, but I've always found Godfather Death stories to be incredibly interesting because variants often tie into a culture's unique perspectives on and associations with death and dying (particularly in the way that Death is portrayed).

> Also have you seen the ghibli red turtle film? Its my favorite film of all time. What kind of fairy tale is it? And what has it borrowed from.

Do you mean Ponyo? That's the only one I can think of that fits your vague description. If that's the case, it's not really an adaptation of any particular tale, perse, though it does have a lot of clear influence from Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Miyazaki movies are very rarely the product of a single inspiration (movies like Tales of Earthsea, Howl's Moving Castle, or Princess Kaguya excluded, as they are specifically adapting a particular story). Miyazaki brings his anti-war and pro-environmentalist perspectives to everything he does, for example, and always tries to work in messages about humans living in symbiosis with nature and with each other. While his works are often fairy tale-esque, they are not fairy tales in and of themselves. Using fairy tale motifs or themes does not inherently make a story a fairy tale

> Also why is the motif of 3’s such a common occurence or so powerful?

That's a question that's unfortunately outside of my wheelhouse. I'd post that question on AskHistorians and see if anyone answers!

>Finally do you have any modern literary adaptations to recommend for fairytales with the same dark henson overtones?

If you like fairy tale retellings with dark overtones, you're going to want to aim for the more adult retellings rather than the much more common middle-grade fairy tale books (which are basically an entire subgenre of at this point). Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, Robin McKinley, Mercedes Lackey, Catherynne M. Valente, the stories in collections like My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and The Starlit Wood, and novels like Naomi Novik's Uprooted or Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy (starting with The Bear and the Nightingale) are good places to start. These are the kinds of books and authors you want to start watching for.

If you like comics at all, check out Fables by Bill Willingham, Monstress by Marjorie Liu, and the webcomic Namesake.