Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Hair bright as gold... Lips red as blood... Heart black as sin... Truth sharp as bone...

As in their previous critically acclaimed volumes of reconsidered fairy tales, award-winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have gathered together remarkable stories that illuminate the more sinister, sensual, and sophisticated aspects of the tales we cherished in childhood - the fables of witches and princes and lost children that we once imagined we knew.

Black Heart, Ivory Bones showcases 20 beguiling tales for the child who was and the adult who is, penned by 20 of the most creative artists in contemporary American literature. Here dissected are the darker anatomies of the timeless, seemingly simple stories we have long loved. Here wonder and truth have serious bite.

A lovelorn prince seeking his father's blessing concocts a fantastic tale of a witch, a tower, and lustrous, long hair.... A pair of accursed red boots punishes a beautiful dancer for her pride.... A troll-killing, princess-rescuing warrior is compelled to consider events from his adversaries' points of view.... In a blistering tell-all memoir, Goldilocks reveals the sordid truth about her brutal foster parent, Papa Bear....

Rich, surprising, funny, erotic, and unsettling, these 20 new yarns and poems offer exceptional new treasures as they brilliantly reveal lusts and jealousies, foibles, hatreds and dangerous obsessions, and the things that slyly lurk in the midnight interior of oft-told tales.