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The title, An Oddly Modern Fairy Tale, is a reference to the series edited by Jack Zipes for Princeton University Press, which includes retellings, translations and rediscoveries of fairy tales. To these various forms of engagement with tales of wonder, the author of this article has added what she describes as an 'anti-fairy tale' of three wealthy Sicilian siblings who recused themselves in differing ways from the twentieth century. The youngest, Lucio, was a lyric poet whose work was admired by both Lampedusa and Montale. His older brother, Casimiro, was a photographer and painter of unsettling watercolours of pop-eyed gnomes and sprites. These he claimed to have witnessed going about their otherworldly lives among the exotic plants that their sister, Agata Giovanna, bought for the extensive gardens whose borders she rarely left. The story ends with Lucio's attempt - both farcical and tragic - to secure a future for the family through the birth of an heir, which resembles similar attempts by Tancredi in Lampedusa's masterpiece The Leopard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short story, based on the tale of "Rapunzel," was written for students from the Royal College of Art and the Guildhall School of Music, London, who performed a multimedia interpretation of the story at the Bath Music Festival, June 6, 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forthcoming in New Perspectives on Angela Carter , edited by Sarah Gamble and Anna Watz, the full interview features four women writers who acknowledge Angela Carter's influence, work with the fairy-tale genre, and live on three different continents. In this excerpt, Intan Paramaditha, Sofia Samatar, Veronica Schanoes, and Marina Warner discuss Angela Carter's writing and her fairy-tale adaptations in relation to their own fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]