“Everything is new. Everything is strange. Everything is possible.” – Yumi Sakugawa

The Fairy Tale Museum is an alchemical curiosity-cabinet-as-novel that showcases the original, spectacular, grotesque, endearing, and otherworldly. You’ll meet bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, a fortune teller, revolutionary ventriloquists’ dummies, a narcoleptic vampire, Eros and Thanatos, and a host of woodland creatures. A celebration of hybrids, creativity, and transformation, this book is a manifesto against putting ourselves into boxes that limit who we can be and what is possible.

Susannah M. Smith's short fiction and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines, including dANDelion, Event, Fireweed and The Antigonish Review. She is also a contributor to First Writes (Banff Centre Press, 2005) and All Sleek and Skimming: Stories (Orca Book Publishers, 2006). She lives in Vancouver.

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“The Fairy Tale Museum has more in common with installation art than with any traditional literary genres… [this book is] an exercise in encouraging creativity.”—Rain Taxi

“The Fairy Tale Museum is a beautifully written book of short prose invites the reader to relax and explore the curated ‘collections’ of pieces. It is a book you can, like a museum, come back to again and again and discover something new each time.”—Prairie Fire Review of Books

“I am easily enchanted by fiction that plays with form and subverts traditional storytelling. That’s why I loved The Fairy Tale Museum… Susannah M. Smith’s writing is poetic and hypnotic and this book was a lovely ode to imagination.”—Augur

“A dream within a dream within a book. A wonderland-like journey through magic and imagination. I’m running out of ways to describe this book, in part because it defies description. If you like dark fairy tales, you’ll probably like this.”—McNally Robinson Staff Pick

“In The Fairy Tale Museum, Susannah M. Smith has crafted a world as seemingly scenic and romantic as a snow globe—except this world can break, it can draw blood, and it can transform. This is a beautiful book, its beauty only deepened by its bite.”—Derek McCormack

“In Susannah M. Smith’s fantastical, moody folkloric menagerie, you can wander slowly and savour, or leap randomly between surprising exhibits. Part Brothers Grimm and part Doktor Bey, part novel and part poem, The Fairy Tale Museum is a moving, exquisite sensory experience. This is an exciting book.”—Stuart Ross

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