Saga’s The Starlit Wood Sings!
The Starlit Wood is an anthology of new fairy tales edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, and published by Saga Press.
It is, first of all, beautiful.
Beautiful to look at (just LOOK!), yes, but also to touch. So much care was poured into the initial aesthetics here; it is a book to fall in love with on sight. It has the appearance of both a very ancient — possibly magical — tome in a wizard’s tower, and of a peculiar stained glass window.
Is the image in the glass a tree that is also a doorway? Or is it that, on the other side of the window, there is a tree that is a doorway? And through that doorway, gold and flame.
The people who will love this book will love it before opening it, for the cover keeps its promises.
It begins with the Introduction. They wanted, wrote editors Wolfe and Parisien, for their authors to “move beyond the woods” of a traditional fairy tale. Now, in some stories this means “removing a piece traditionally viewed as integral to the story,” and in others, “putting a character as geographically far as possible from his or her original setting, as Little Red Riding Hood in the desert.” Perhaps most exciting of all (to me, anyway), it still other stories it means “exploring lesser-known or even newly discovered fairy tales.”
What they invite you into — that doorway through the tree, into flame? — is “an adventure that’s strangely familiar, and startlingly different.” And like the cover’s promises, Wolfe and Parisien make good their welcome.
On the morning of Sunday, August 1, I was in no particular hurry to get to the Hall Theatre. I planned to see the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, but knowing it had already played the large room of the Hall once I didn’t anticipate I’d have difficulty finding a seat. I intended after that to go across the street to the De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch Operation: Avalanche, a found-footage fiction about filmmakers who’d faked the moon landing in 1969. Then I’d go have a bite to eat and come back for two more movies. It sounded like a nice well-spaced day, but when I got to the Hall ten minutes before Train to Busan was scheduled to start I found I’d radically underestimated the film’s popularity. As the doors opened to let the ticket-holders in, the line stretched around the corner, up to the next street, and then around the corner there. Luckily enough, I was able to find a good seat in the back of the Hall, where I watched the auditorium fill up with an enthusiastic crowd.
Saturday, July 30, I had hopes of seeing four shows at Fantasia. In the event, I saw three — and ended up with an interesting chat after the last one. First came an animated teen dystopia from Martinique, Battledream Chronicle, in which a young woman fights to free her homeland from digital colonialism. After that came a collection of short films, the International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase 2016 (one of the shorts being an adaptation of Ken Liu’s short story “
I know I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of the original anthology, and I’d like to take the opportunity to draw your attention to two new ones that have crossed my table in the last month or so.
