A monumental career retrospective

The Collected Enchantments

stories and poems by Theodora Goss

2023 Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List, Best Collection

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“This vibrant collection brings together World Fantasy Award winner Goss’s exquisite interpretations of and variations on familiar folk and fairy tales. The [poems and stories] span the length of Goss’s career . . . The abundance of pieces sometimes has the effect of a musical fugue: common motifs, places, and characters echo through the works, with each reappearance adding something fresh.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In the tradition of great modern fantasists like Angela Carter and Marina Warner, Theodora Goss’s sublime tales are modern classics—beautiful, sly, sensual and deeply moving . . . I envy any reader encountering Goss’s work for the first time.”
—Elizabeth Hand, winner of the Mythopoeic, Nebula, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards

Cover art by Catrin Welz-Stein.

A wicked stepsister frets over all the ways in which she failed to receive her mother’s love. A lost woman travels through an enchanted forest looking for someone who can remind her of her name. A girl must wear down seven pairs of shoes to gain help from a witch. A fox makes a life with a human, but neither can deny their true natures. A young woman returns to her childhood home and the fantastic stories she left there. A man lets himself be taken prisoner by the Snow Queen to prove that the woman who loves him would walk barefoot through the ice to save him. Medusa cuts her hair for love.

The Collected Enchantments gathers retellings of folk and fairy tales in prose and verse from World Fantasy and Locus award-winning author Theodora Goss, creator of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series. Drawing from her Mythopoeic Award-nominated collections In the Forest of Forgetting and Songs for Ophelia and her Mythopoeic Award-winning tome Snow White Learns Witchcraft, and adding new and uncollected stories and poems, The Collected Enchantments provides a resounding demonstration of how, as Jo Walton writes, Goss provides “a vivid, authentic and important voice” that, in the words of Jane Yolen, “transposes, transforms, and transcends times, eras, and old tales with ease.”

With cover art by Catrin Welz-Stein and interior illustrations by Paula Arwen Owen.

More praise for Theodora Goss

“The elegance of Goss’s work has never ceased to amaze me. It feels effortless, but endlessly evocative and suggestive, flowing with the rhythms of both the natural world and the intimate socio-familial cosmos. Goss’s language fits together like gems in a complex crown, a diadem of images and motifs, resting gently on the head, but with a deceptive weight.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, winner of the Mythopoeic, Locus, Hugo, Otherwise and Theodore Sturgeon awards

“Theodora Goss re-fleshes and re-clothes old tales in multifarious ways. Through prose and poetry, Goss shines her unique light into the fairytale forest—and many bright eyes gleam back.”
—Margo Lanagan, Aurealis, Ditmar and World Fantasy award winner

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Why I Write Fantasy

• Why You Might Be a Witch

• The Rose in Twelve Petals

• The Ogress Queen

• Rose Child

• The Rapid Advance of Sorrow

• Lady Winter

• Shoes of Bark

• Miss Emily Gray

• The Witch

• Binnorie

• The Wings of Meister Wilhelm

• The Egg in Twelve Scenes

• Vivian to Merlin

• In Autumn

• Seven Shoes

• The Clever Serving-Maid

• Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon

• The Cinder Girl Burns Brightly

• The Stepsister’s Tale

• Lily, With Clouds

• The Gold-Spinner

• Rumpelstiltskin

• Singing of Mount Abora

• The Dragons

• Thumbelina

• In the Forest of Forgetting

• Autumn’s Song

• Green Man

• Sleeping With Bears

• Goldilocks and the Bear

• The Bear’s Wife

• Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold

• Persephone in Hades

• The Princess and the Peas

• Blanchefleur

• Rapunzel

• The Sorceress in the Tower

• Fair Ladies

• Swan Girls

• The Gentleman

• Christopher Raven

• Ravens

• The Fox Wife

• Reynalda

• Mr. Fox

• The Mysterious Miss Tickle

• Lessons with Miss Gray

• The Witch-Girls

• The Witch’s Cat

• Pip and the Fairies

• Tam Lin Remembers the Fairy Queen

• The Fairies’ Gifts

• Snow, Blood, Fur

• When You Have Lost Yourself

• The Mermaid’s Lament

• Conversations with the Sea Witch

• Diamonds and Toads

• Medusa Gets a Haircut

• The Other Thea

• Mother Night

• The Red Shoes

• Red as Blood and White as Bone

• Girl, Wolf, Woods

• In the Snow Queen’s Castle

• A Country Called Winter

• How to Make It Snow

• Snow White Learns Witchcraft

• How to Become a Witch-Queen

• Mirror, Mirror

• The River’s Daughter

• Saint Orsola and the Poet

• The Nightingale and the Rose

• Your House