Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the Athena Club series of novels, The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, as well as the two-sided novella The Thorn and the Blossom. Her short story and poetry collections include In the Forest of Forgetting, Songs for Ophelia, and Snow White Learns Witchcraft. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She has a PhD in English literature, and teaches literature and writing at Boston University.

The Collected Enchantments by Theodora Goss

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 massive retrospective volume 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."

CURATOR'S NOTE

Theodora Goss has built an award-winning career on the gorgeous re-imaging and inventive reframing of classic fairy tales and Eastern European folklore. Winner of the Locus, Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Awards, Dora took my suggestion to assemble an omnibus of her tales and transformed it into something absolutely enchanting. Epic in scope, The Collected Enchantments brims with magic of all kinds. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "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

  • "For Goss, fairy tales are less a set of texts than a language she's become fluent in; sometimes she doesn't even bother to explain which tale she's riffing on, as with poems that subtly invoke classics like The Goose Girl, Fitcher's Bird, or Melusine. Add to this the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin (which expresses itself in somewhat different ways) and Goss's own experience as a childhood immigrant from Hungary, and the result is a lyrical, resonant voice and a vision not quite like anyone else's."

    – Locus
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Excerpt from

"Red as Blood and White as Bone"

I am an orphan. I was born among these mountains, to a woodcutter and his wife. My mother died in childbirth, and my infant sister died with her. My father felt that he could not keep me, so he sent me to the sisters of St. Margarete, who had a convent farther down the mountain on which we lived, the Karhegy. I was raised by the sisters on brown bread, water, and prayer.

This is a good way to start a fairy tale, is it not?

When I was twelve years old, I was sent to the household of Baron Orso Kalman, whose son was later executed for treason, to train as a servant. I started in the kitchen, scrubbing the pots and pans with a brush, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees with an even bigger brush. Greta, the German cook, was bad-tempered, as was the first kitchen maid, Agneta. She had come from Karberg, the big city at the bottom of the Karhegy—at least it seemed big, to such a country bumpkin as I was then. I was the second kitchen maid and slept in a small room that was probably a pantry, with a small window high up, on a mattress filled with straw. I bathed twice a week, after Agneta in her bathwater, which had already grown cold. In addition to the plain food we received as servants, I was given the leftovers from the baron's table after Greta and Agneta had picked over them. That is how I first tasted chocolate cake, and sausages, and beer. And I was given two dresses of my very own. Does this not seem like much? It was more than I had received at the convent. I thought I was a lucky girl!

I had been taught to read by the nuns, and my favorite thing to read was a book of fairy tales. Of course the nuns had not given me such a thing. A young man who had once stayed in the convent's guesthouse had given it to me, as a gift. I was ten years old, then. One of my duties was herding the goats. The nuns were famous for a goat's milk cheese, and so many of our chores had to do with the goats, their care and feeding. Several times, I met this man up in the mountain pastures. (I say man, but he must have been quite young still, just out of university. To me he seemed dreadfully old.) I was with the goats, he was striding on long legs, with a walking stick in his hand and a straw hat on his head. He always stopped and talked to me, very politely, as he might talk to a young lady of quality.

One day, he said, "You remind me of a princess in disguise, Klara, here among your goats." When I told him that I did not know what he meant, he looked at me in astonishment. "Have you never read any fairy tales?" Of course not. I had read only the Bible and my primer. Before he left the convent, he gave me a book of fairy tales, small but beautifully illustrated. "This is small enough to hide under your mattress," he said. "Do not let the nuns see it, or they will take it from you, thinking it will corrupt you. But it will not. Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them."

Years later, I saw his name again in a bookstore window and realized he had become a poet, a famous one. But by then he was dead. He had died in the war, like so many of our young men.

I followed his instructions, hiding the book under my mattress and taking it out only when there was no one to see me. That was difficult at the convent, where I slept in a room with three other girls. It was easier in the baron's house, where I slept alone in a room no one else wanted, not even to store turnips. And the book did indeed become a Bible to me, a surer guide than that other Bible written by God himself, as the nuns had taught. For I knew nothing of Israelites or the building of pyramids or the parting of seas. But I knew about girls who scrubbed floors and grew sooty sleeping near the hearth, and fish who gave you wishes (although I had never been given one), and was not Greta, our cook, an ogress? I'm sure she was. I regarded fairy tales as infallible guides to life, so I did not complain at the hard work I was given, because perhaps someday I would meet an old woman in the forest, and she would tell me that I was a princess in disguise. Perhaps.

The day on which she came was a cold, dark day. It had been raining for a week. Water poured down from the sky, as though to drown us all, and it simply did not stop. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. Greta and Agneta were meeting with the housekeeper, Frau Hoffman, about a ball that was to take place in three days' time. It would celebrate the engagement of the baron's son, Vadek, to the daughter of a famous general, who had fought for the Austro-Hungarian emperor in the last war. Prince Radomir himself was staying at the castle. He had been hunting with Vadek Kalman in the forest that covered the Karhegy until what Greta called this unholy rain began. They had been at school together, Agneta told me. I found it hard to believe that a prince would go to school, for they never did in my tales. What need had a prince for schooling, when his purpose in life was to rescue fair maidens from the dragons that guarded them, and fight ogres, and ride on carpets that flew through the air like aeroplanes? I had never in my life seen either a flying carpet or an aeroplane: to me, they were equally mythical modes of transportation.

I had caught a glimpse of the general's daughter when she first arrived the day before, with her father and lady's maid. She was golden-haired, and looked like a porcelain doll under her hat, which Agneta later told me was from Paris. The lady's maid had told Frau Hoffman, who had told Greta, and the news had filtered down even to me. But I thought a Paris hat looked much like any other hat, and I had no interest in a general's daughter. She did not have glass slippers, and I was quite certain she could not spin straw into gold. So what good was she?

I was sitting, as I have said, in the kitchen beside the great stone hearth, peeling potatoes by a fire I was supposed to keep burning so it could later be used for roasting meat. The kitchen was dark, because of the storm outside. I could hear the steady beating of rain on the windows, the crackling of wood in the fire. Suddenly, I heard a thump, thump, thump against the door that led out to the kitchen garden. What could it be? For a moment, my mind conjured images out of my book: a witch with a poisoned apple, or Death himself. But then I realized it must be Josef, the under-gardener. He often knocked on that door when he brought peas or asparagus from the garden and made cow-eyes at Agneta.

"A moment," I cried, putting aside the potatoes I had been peeling, leaving the knife in a potato near the top of the basket so I could find it again easily. Then I went to the door.

When I pulled it open, something that had been leaning against it fell inside. At first I could not tell what it was, but it moaned and turned, and I saw that it was a woman in a long black cloak. She lay crumpled on the kitchen floor. Beneath her cloak she was naked: her white legs gleamed in the firelight. Fallen on the ground beside her was a bundle, and I thought: Beggar woman. She must be sick from hunger.

Greta, despite her harshness toward me, was often compassionate to the beggar women who came to our door—war widows, most of them. She would give them a hunk of bread or a bowl of soup, perhaps even a scrap of meat. But Greta was not here. I had no authority to feed myself, much less a woman who had wandered here in the cold and wet.

Yet there she lay, and I had to do something.

* * *