The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales is from Ticonderoga Publications in Australia and won the 2010 Aurealis Award for Best Collection. It has gorgeous cover by Lisa L. Hannett, an introduction by Jack Dann and contains reprints of stories such as The Little Match Girl, Bluebeard, Frozen, Dresses, three and new stories including The Bone Mother, The Living Book and The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You.
The book is available here and the ebook here.
Jack Dann says in his introduction: ‘Her writing, which seems transparent as glass, as if so easily and simply wrought, belies the complete control of craft and the complexity of the material floating and glinting and shifting just under the surface. Her concerns are the primordial fears of childhood…and adulthood: the dark, slimy, senescent fairy-tale monsters that threaten to chop off our fingers when we suck our thumbs, burn us to death if we play with matches, or turn us into pale, thin, little corpses if we won’t eat our soup…the same monsters—albeit transmogrified into suits and skirts—that stalk us even now and threaten to maim us yet again as we flee that dangerous, ill-remembered country called childhood.’
Reviews:
‘I am quite sure that readers of this superior book will remain spellbound by the sheer beauty of the stories. I highly recommend it, as well as its companion volume, the other collection by Angela Slatter entitled Sourdough and Other Stories recently published by Tartarus Press.’ Mario Guslandi, SF Site.
‘The Girl with No Hands collects many of Slatter’s early fairytales, some of which were written as part of a postgraduate thesis. In these stories, Slatter’s emerging star status is immediately evident. Slatter rewrites well-known fairytales from a feminist perspective, adding (or depending how you view it, restoring) an edge to them that frequently shocks. What most takes the breath away here is Slatter’s control of character and style. The prose dances, sparkles, engrosses.’ Rjurik Davidson, Overland.