Reddit reviews My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me A collection of 're-told' fairy tales by some pretty prolific authors. There are some really great stories in here.

You should check out any of Neil Gaiman's short story compilations
like Smoke and Mirrors (Smoke and Mirrors) or Fragile Things (Fragile Things). Also, Stories: All-New Tales Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio (Stories: All-New Tales Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio) and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me) are a couple of great short-story anthologies that have some very strange/creepy moments.

Edit: Links in this subreddit tend to be pretty illegible, so I have included the titles of each book in parenthesis after the links for immediate legibility's sake).

For fairy tales, I recommend the following:

• The Victorian Fairy Tales Book
  
• Norton's The Classic Fairy Tales
  
• Norton's The Great Fairy Tale Tradition
  
• The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales
  
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
  
• Any and all of Andrew Lang's Colored Fairy Books (the first two focus on collections of well-known tales, but most of them are sort of themed/grouped geographically and have fairy tales from all over the world)
  
• The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald
  
• The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend
  
• I'm a big fan of the various "Annotated" Fairy Tale collections, like the Annotated Brothers Grimm, Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, and Annotated Hans Christen Andersen, though I don't always agree with the editorializing. It's a whole series, so I'm only going to link to a couple.
  
• On that note, look for book collections put together and/or edited by Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes. They're the two most prominent fairy tale scholars at the moment and basically have an unofficial duopoly on the fairy tale academic criticism market.
  
• Also, a special shout-out to P.J. Lynch's illustrated version of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and really all of the fairy tales books that Lynch illustrates. They're beautiful.
  
  
  For mythology and classical studies, there are a couple that are basically required reading for any Mythology or Classics class. Since several people have already recommended anthologies of Greek myths, I'm going to err more on the "Classics" side of the conversation:
  
  
• Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
  
• The Odyssey, Homer (I recommend the Fagles translation due to its prominence in academia and its status as one of the best translations of the work)
  
• The Illiad, Homer (again, Fagles translation)
  
• The Aeneid, Virgil (again, Fagles has a translation that's very good). My bias as a Latin student, however, leads me to also recommend Pharr, which has no real use to you if you don't know Latin but it's the most popular all-time textbook version of the Aeneid)
  
• Metamorpheses, Ovid
  
• You also probably want to look at some Greek plays like the Sophoclean Tragedies/Three Thebian Plays

Oooh, yes, that sounds awesome. Have you ever checked out this collection? I haven't read them all but some are pretty good, and might be perfect for your class!

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.