Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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A collection of re-interpreted ancient folk tales, from the British isles— Cornwall, Wales, Fens, Yorkshire etc—written by contemporary authors. The eeriness of the story really draws you in, but I think the shortness means it falls flat as there's not much time to really carve out a solid, captivating ending. Literally like the Dauntless Girl and The Brothers (or Sisters I guess, girl power amirite) bear no similarity whatsoever to the source stories unless they're like fucking origin stories, the Panther's Tale (one of the only ones I sort of somewhat liked) springs from a tiny snippet of folklore about how a noble house got its motto, and the Fairy Midwife is just.

Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. Logan treads familiar ground here -selkies and women giving birth to their children was an important element to her debut novel The Gracekeepers- but I love her writing so you don't hear me complain. Overall I feel this is a solid collection and would be perfect for a cosy, mildly spooky, unsettling read. But she transposes onto it the story of a woman who has been transformed into the panther, and in doing so mashes up traditional Indian storytelling with the Staffordshire legend. The echoes between stories give the collection a wonderfully satisfying cohesion, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.These stories were wonderful imagined, some stronger than others but as a whole I thoroughly enjoyed the ride! Hag is a collection of forgotten folktales wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today. In Hag a range of brilliant female authors from Britain and Ireland were assigned a folktale and given free rein on how to adapt it. Overall, I thought this was a decent collection, though there were some stories that definitely are catered to a specific audience. Here are sisters fighting for the love of the same woman, a pregnant archaeologist unearthing impossible bones and lost children following you home.

I didn't like Chlo as a person, but it was really interesting seeing the relationship between the sisters without them actually being close. I'm not quite sure how to rate this as it's a collection of stories written by 10 different authors in very different styles. When it's time for Lowan to pay the cost, he comes up with something completely unexpected and things turn around for him.

Larrington provides the reader with a lengthy, remarkably insightful and informative introduction which includes the exploration of the title, Hag. Undoubtedly, this is one of the most appealing and riveting short story collections I've read in recent years, and I can't recommend it highly enough for those who enjoy old myths and legends, and even the supernatural or fairytales, and one of the best aspects is that this book doesn't just retell the prominent stories we all know, hence the use of ’forgotten’ in the title. Between Sea and Sky' by Kirsty Logan was a beautiful take on 'The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie' that is almost an elegy to complicated mother- and womanhood. This collection includes an introduction by Carolyne Larrington who is an author and professor of medieval literature at Oxford University.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. When he captures a panther that reminds people of the devil himself, things turn out to be even more magical than they could have imagined. Among the best stories are those which let the original material speak for itself, albeit in a changed context.Now augmented by two further stories commissioned from Irenosen Okojie and Imogen Hermes Gowar, they are being issued in book form by Virago, the indefatigable publisher of books by women.