Terri
Windling
Registered User
(8/2/04 9:22 am)
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Fairies in the New York Times
There was a long article on Susanna Clarke and her fabulous new
fairy-tale-rich book Strange
and Norrell in the Sunday Times magazine yesterday. An on-line
copy can be found here:
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/magazine/01CLARKE.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091459558-IKW62xGNGn5eSqiN2eMIzw
It's terrific to see Susanna get this attention, and also to see
Kelly Link referenced about the lines between fantasy and mainstream
getting blurrier.... All in all, it's a very good plug for the field
of fairy tale literature, although I could wish that the author
hadn't portrayed the fantasy field as being quite so...weird. That
old, tired stereotype. Susanna, after all, has not been involved
in the dragon-quest end of the field -- she's been publishing in
the literary end, in volumes like Starlight;
Black
Swan, White Raven; and Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.
What the article doesn't indicate is that there's been plenty of
literary fantasy for years. What's new here is that a mainstream
publisher is able to push a work of literary fantasy to this degree
-- not that it exists at all. Bantam tried the same push with Little,Big
years ago, but in those pre-Harry-Potter days, it was a much harder
row to how.
What do others here make of this article?
Quibbles about the journalist's tone aside, I am so happy for Susanna! Couldn't have happened to a nicer person. And the book is a pure delight.
Edited by: Terri Windling at: 8/2/04 9:33 am
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