Similar thoughts were expressed (twice!) by user bananaslammock8 on REDDIT.
I love Jane Yolen (I’m a huge fan of folklore and fairytales) and this anthology of her darkest short stories didn’t disappoint. It’s a perfect quick read for a gloomy autumn evening or to get you in the mood for spooky season. They’re all standalone, unrelated stories – my favorites were Wilding, Inscription, and The Fisherman’s Wife.
This was a delightful collection of Yolen’s darkest stories. I love fairytales and I have loved everything by Yolen I’ve ever read. This is a perfect short, spooky read for fall/Halloween.
What are some of your favorite stories in The Midnight Circus, and what inspired you to write them? (Also, happy book birthday!)
janeyolenAMA Author
Among my favorites: Inscription, Requiem Antarctica, (which I wrote with Robert J.Harris), Become A Warrior, and Little Red (written with Adam Stemple.)
jphistory
Oh dear god, Jane Yolen is talking to us on the internet! I can’t cope. You shaped my childhood landscape and taught me that even in children’s fiction, themes can be difficult and language can be beautiful. Thank you.
janeyolenAMA Author
Thank you. I used to fan girl over LeGuin till InHAD BREAKFAST WITH HER ONE CONFERENCE. AND she said, “Oh tosh!” and we became friends.
jphistory
Oh my goodness! That is such a wonderful story. She was truly a special person.
I admit it. I like small pieces of writing. I was a poet first, even as a child. I sold poems to high school and college journals (“sold” when speaking of poetry usually means no money!) And then after college I began writing picture books (small, usually less than 1,000 words, now less than 500 words) and sold them. (“sold” here means getting paid actually money, sometimes about $1000, sometimes as much as $25,000). And then I began selling short stories—fairy tales, realistic, fantastic, and sf-inal. (Both for no money and some money.)
And sometimes magic happens. A poem turns into a picture book. A short story turns into a novel. A novel or a picture book turn into films or tv shows. The magic is not the turning, it is in the money! As my late agent said, “It can’t be reprinted unless it’s printed.” Which made me understand why sometimes you can sell an 8-line poem for a hundred dollars and someone pays $10,000 to reprint it. This actually happened to me. Once. But once is enough for a story and a moral lesson.
2: Actually re-reading the stories in order to choose the ones for the book. For the first book, the theme was fantasy authors and stories about them or their creations. Book two’s theme was looking at the many fractured fairy tales I had written over the years. Both as short strides and as picture books and as easy readers for children.
But this time the theme was dark stories. As I never consider myself a “horror” writer (even though I have written three Holocaust novels), I was shocked to find so many of these stories on my backlist. I am more interested in the frisson of terror than the bloody stumps. I will kill people quietly on the page, more bloodily out of sight. But there they were: Dark story after dark story. I had to read them myself in order to choose the ones for the collection. Some of them made me shudder. (None of them made me throw up.) And then I found myself remembering– that this one or that one had been in the Year’s Best Horror anthologies. That was a surprise! And a favorite bit of a memory jog. And tipped for (but didn’t get) an award.
