Kate Bernheimer is, most recently,
the author of the story collection Horse,
Flower, Bird, illustrated by Rikki
Ducornet (Coffee House 2010), and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My
Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin,
September 28, 2010). She is also author of a trilogy of novels about three
sisters: The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, The Complete Tales of Ketzia
Gold (which was a finalist for the Oregon
Book Award) and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (spring 2011, all from FC2). She also writes children's books. Her
first, The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum, illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli (Schwartz & Wade/Random House),
was a PW Best Book of 2008. Two more
children's books are forthcoming from Random House. She is founder and editor of Fairy
Tale Review, and associate
professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette
each spring. She lives the rest of the year in Tucson, Ariz., with her husband,
the poet Brent Hendricks, and their daughter, Xia.
On your nightstand now:
Maria Tatar's Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix and Roald Dahl's collected stories (which are not at all good for bedtime). Also, a boxed set of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad volumes, which my daughter and I simply love. I identify so greatly with Toad; she's all Frog. And Scott Simon's Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption just arrived in the mail from my mother. My husband and I adopted our daughter in China and I've heard wonderful things about this book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
In early childhood The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright was by far my most beloved book--it was so mysterious and magical to me. How I longed to be friends with Edith and the bears. Of course as an adult, I can see how "Grey Gardens" it is for some readers, but I still experience it in a very innocent way. It remains a very big influence.
Your top five authors:
My grandfather, Art Moger, who wrote pun books, a memoir called Some of My Best Friends Are People and a book about celebrities who had changed their names called Hello! My Real Name Is... (I have always been a big Bob Dylan fan, and as a kid, thought that my grandfather must know him, because how else would he know his "real name"?--so that book really impressed me). My grandfather is a top author for me because he was a living example that it was possible to live as a literary artist, whatever form you wrote in or however you scraped it together; he also wrote and illustrated the Howard Johnson's children's menus. Other cherished literary figures for me include those who write, edit, celebrate, publish, illustrate and translate fairy tales from around the world and across the ages, especially the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Italo Calvino and thousands of anonymous others--many living today.
Book you've faked reading:
I once won a dictionary in high school--maybe the only thing I've ever won. I claimed, the next fall, to have read the entire thing over the summer. I was shy and it seemed like something to say. I still use that same dictionary. I love it!
Books you're an evangelist for:
I constantly invite people to turn back to the old, sometimes awkwardly translated volumes of fairy tales from around the world that they may never have read, because they are so strange, poetic and new; I'm an evangelist for people encountering first-hand how influential these stories clearly have been on contemporary literature. And also Joy Williams's 1978 novel The Changeling, which I believe to be one of the most astonishing and important 20th century novels. Disclosure: I'm such an evangelist that I established a teeny literary press that I run out of my bedroom to bring it back into print.
What is your favorite fairy tale?
I love them all, but especially, now, "The Story of Grandmother," the first known literary version of "Little Red Riding Hood." There are a few lines in it that have the most amazing poetics ("Are you taking the path of needles or pins?"). In it, the girl cleverly escapes from the wolf by--well, I won't give it away. It's not a story for children, I should add. Maria Tatar has a wonderful translation of it. That story haunted me as a child, too, though I only had a Golden Book version, and a topsy-turvy doll that really scared me (on one side was Little Red Riding Hood, and under her skirt, on the other side, were both the grandmother and wolf. Eek.).
Book you've bought for the cover:
I remember choosing A Very Young Dancer by Jill Krementz when I was about 10 in a bookstore--I loved watching ballet and, as a child, I was strangely drawn to children's books rendered in photographs. There was another one that was about telling time that featured a real little girl who ate lunch at a real little table, and beside her was a doll of Humpty Dumpty. My mind could not wrap itself around these books in photographs: Real children? Real dolls? They got to live in books? How I envied them! I became a writer because I wanted to live inside a book.
Book that changed your life:
The books that my parents read to me as a child gave me a sense of solace and peace--the experience of being read to, whatever the book, completely changed my life, because without that experience I think I would have had no place I felt so at home. That would have changed things for the worse.
Favorite line from a book:
"The end." I just find it so satisfying when you turn the page and: there it is, in big, special font. I think every book should have it. It is a sad moment, when it's a book you love, but that's part of the beauty.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The amazing thing is, now that I am a mother, I feel that I do get to experience for the first time again books I so love. We are now reading together Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and it really does feel again, seeing the astonishment in her eyes, like the first time for me, too.