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Our mission is to publish stories and poems that reflect the diversity of folk and fairy tales from around the world. We appreciate the collected works of the brothers Grimm, Perrault and Lang. However, we refuse to overlook the wealth of stories that have their origins elsewhere and prefer to publish works derived from less familiar cultures. Before submitting to Scheherezade's Bequest, we strongly suggest having a look at some of the free ebooks offered by SurLaLune to acquaint yourself with tales from India, Hungary, Japan, Russia, Portugal, Africa and more.

    What We Like

    Read Scheherezade’s Bequest to see examples of the kind of fiction and poetry we like. Helen’s Spells of Enchantment: The Fairy Tale Cycle is an excellent essay on why fairy tales are important. If you are unclear on what a fairy tale is, Heidi Anne Heiner’s Answering What is a Fairy Tale? is a good place to start. We also suggest Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts for an extensive look at the various tale types.

    Because we read hundreds of variants of the same stories during each reading period, old favorites such as Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel are going to be a hard sell.


    What We Need

    If you are an author, publisher or editor and have a title you’d like us to review, or if you are a blogger and would like to contribute to the site, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

    Cabinet des Fées is always looking for non-​​fiction articles and essays, first readers, bloggers and anyone interested in fairy tales to join us either as volunteer staff or as one-​​time contributors to the site.

Scheherezade's Bequest

Scheherezade’s Bequest is a tri-​​annual, online webzine of fiction and poetry in the fairy tale tradition. We publish both original fairy tales and revision of old favorites, and are particularly interested in the more obscure fairy tales that are often overlooked in our Disney-​​saturated culture.

It was in the 19th century in Western Europe that the fairy tale was normalized into the form in which we best know it today, but that doesn’t mean we limit ourselves to that time or place, to the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, or Andrew Lang in our retellings. We refuse to overlook the wealth of stories that have their origins elsewhere, and are proud to follow in the footsteps of collectors and anthologists like Angela Carter, Jane Yolen, and Terri Windling in publishing tales inspired by far-​​flung cultures and diverse sources.

If you are interested in submitting fiction to Scheherezade’s Bequest, you can find our guidelines here.


Image: Scheherazade, Kay Nielsen (1922)

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