SOURCE: Hallissy, Margaret. Review of The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, edited by Alison Lurie. Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 2 (spring 1995): 267-68.

In the following review, Hallissy asserts that the appeal of the selections in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales lies in the stories' variations on established, traditional fairy-tale themes and elements.

Like the Bible and Arthuriana, fairy tales stimulate creativity in ways that other literature does not; nobody rewrites Hamlet, but Job and Lancelot and Cinderella continually reappear in modern dress. Whereas the original fairy tales can be read on various levels by children and adults, these modern redactions are for adults only. These modern writers employ resonances from the reader's childhood with the conventional characters, images, and situations of the fairy tale as themes upon which they play variations.

The reader of modern fairy tales brings to the experience a mind already well...