New Releases by Kate Bernheimer

This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second entry in the Divide anthology series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West. In this collection legends, myths, tales, omens, folk horror, and science fiction explore the fantastical, the apocalyptic, the bizarre, the unknown, and the apocryphal origins and conclusions of life on the occidental side of the Continental Divide. In this collection, after the ''what is'' comes the ''what will be'', as acclaimed authors and emerging voices weave tales that push the boundaries of imagination: Ken Liu takes us to the frontiers of America and China in a stark tale of perseverance; Kate Bernheimer immerses us in the fairytale lands of modern celebrity; Benjamin Percy takes us hunting for deer and connection in eastern Oregon; Yuri Herrera grants us insight on our future overlords; Tessa Fontaine places us in-between with a monster and a question; Dominique Dickey chases familiar ghosts; and Willy Vlautin takes us on the wild ride that is a winning streak. Accompanied by a foreword from This Side of the Divide alum, and author of The Forbidden City, Vanessa Hua, these twenty-five pieces of new lore excavate the beauty, the uncertainty, the longing, the bitter interactions and stark truths; the strong people and vivid places that have shaped, and will continue to shape the West until the end of days.

Fairy Tale Architecture is a ground-breaking book, the first study to bring architects in conversation with fairy tales in breathtaking designs. Little Red Riding Hood, Baba Yaga, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Snow Queen: these and more than fifteen other stories designed by Bernheimer Architecture, Snøhetta, Rural Studio, LEVENBETTS, and LTL Architects and many other international vanguards have created stunning works for this groundbreaking collection of architectural fairy tales. Story by story, Andrew Bernheimer and Kate Bernheimer--a brother and sister team as in an old fairy tale--have built the ultimate home for lovers of fiction and design. Snow girls and spinning houses. Paper capes and engineered hair braids. Resin bee hives and infinite libraries. Here are futuristic structures made from traditional stories, inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen''s The Snow Queen and The Little Match Girl to the Brothers Grimm''s Rapunzel and The Juniper Tree to fairy tales by Jorge Luis Borges and Joy Williams and from China, Japan, Russia, Nigeria, and Mexico. A desire for story and shelter counts as among our most ancient instincts, and this dual desire continues to inspire our most imaginative architects and authors today. Fairy Tale Architecture invites the reader into a space of wonder, into a new form that will endure ever after.

In this world, clarity and wonder go hand and hand.

Una niña se niega a cepillarse el pelo, pero cuando un equipo de los ratones se instala en sus cabellos enredados, se enfrenta a una decisión difícil - para cepillar o no cepillar.

Había una vez un pequeño castillo que estaba expuesto en un museo. Los niños que iban allí de visita se apretujaban en torno a la bola de cristal que lo contenía, pues habían oído decir que si miraban con mucha atención, podrían ver una niñita en su interior?¿Puedes verla tú? He aquí un original cuento de hadas que parece un sueño: evocador, bello y verdaderamente inolvidable.

Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer''s latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer''s girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone. Kate Bernheimer is the author of the short story collection Horse, Flower, Bird and the editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and the journal Fairy Tale Review.

Edward Hopper’s painting "Office at Night" is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on “the facts” of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.

In Floater, Kate Bernheimer introduces us to Mike, a girl with a mysterious connection to a recent set of bridge suicides. With taut and lucid prose, we are taken through a day in Mike''s life, from dreamless sleep to phone calls with no one on the other end to the usual booth in the diner. Noah Saterstrom''s illustrations perfectly complement the quiet melancholy of the story: his frenetic images seem incomplete, unfinished, with conflicting lines and smudges that leave you wondering what might be there, beneath the surface.

This hilarious, over-the-top story is perfect for any little girl who doesn''t like to brush her hair. What happens when our heroine neglects her long tresses? Well, one day a mouse comes to live in a particularly tangled lock. Soon after, more mice move in, and the girl''s unruly mop is transformed into a marvelous mouse palace complete with secret passageways and a cheese cellar! But as the girl comes to find out, living with more than a hundred mice atop your head isn''t always easy. . . . "This tale will send kids the message that they must take care of their tresses." —Booklist "There are parents who will weep with joy at the prospect of a book that may encourage little Susie or Sam to finally brush that mane." —The Bulletin

Once there was a girl who lived in a castle. The castle was inside a museum. When children visited, they’d press against the glass globe in which the castle sat, to glimpse the tiny girl. But when they went home, the girl was lonely. Then one day, she had an idea! What if you hung a picture of yourself inside the castle inside the museum, inside this book? Then you’d able to keep the girl company. Reminiscent of “The Lady of Shalot,” here is an original fairy tale that feels like a dream—haunting, beautiful, and completely unforgettable.

When a wonderful new book arrives at the library, at first it is loved by all, checked out constantly, and rarely spends a night on the library shelf. But over time it grows old and worn, and the children lose interest in its story. The book is sent to the library''s basement where the other faded books live. How it eventually finds an honored place on a little girl''s bookshelf—and in her heart—makes for an unforgettable story sure to enchant anyone who has ever cherished a book. Kate Bernheimer and Chris Sheban have teamed up to create a picture book that promises to be loved every bit as much as the lonely book itself.

"El libro se sentía feliz cuando lo leían, y a menudo algún niño se lo llevaba a casa. Pero el libro fue envejeciendo y ya casi nadie lo sacaba del estante de la biblioteca. Hasta que un día, una niña encontró el libro solitario y empezó a leer aquellas páginas gastadas--"--P. [4] of cover.

"Each of these spare and elegant tales rings like a bell in your head. memorable, original, and not much like anything you''ve read."—Karen Joy Fowler “A strange and enchanting book, written in crisp, winning sentences; each story begs to be read aloud and savored.”—Aimee Bender "Horse, Flower, Bird rests uneasily between the intersection of fantasy and reality, dreaming and wakefulness, and the sacred and profane. Like a series of beautiful but troubling dreams, this book will linger long in the memory. Kate Bernheimer is reinventing the fairy tale."—Peter Buck, R.E.M. In Kate Bernheimer''s familiar and spare—yet wondrous—world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger''s daughter befriends a tulip bulb, and sisters explore cycles of love and violence by reenacting scenes from Star Wars. Enthralling, subtle, and poetic, this collection takes readers back to the age-old pleasures of classic fairy tales and makes them new. Their haunting lessons are an evocative reminder that cracking open the door to the imagination is no mere child''s play, that delight and tragedy lurk in every corner, and that we all "have the key to the library . . . only be careful what you read."

As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods. Like her sisters, who appeared in Bernheimer’s first two novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold), Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. Novelist Donna Tartt writes, “Lucy’s particular brand of optimism, blind to its own shadow, is very American—she is innocence holding itself apart so fastidiously that it becomes its opposite.” This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer’s enchanting body of work.

A sequel to The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, the novel follows Merry from her suburban childhood through design school and a whirlwind of lovers, and into a desolate adulthood. Beginning with a toy seal and ending with mushrooms, this fairy tale set in modern times creeps through cruelty and violence to its inevitable end.

Her childhood romance with talented, brilliant Adam Brown flowers briefly into a marriage of tenderness and erotic fervor, but Ketzia cannot escape her own intelligence, and soon finds herself compelled toward intoxicating self-destruction. Bernheimer draws upon the motifs of traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore to shape Ketzia''s bewildering adventures. This meeting of nursery rhyme and nightmare transforms everyday objects as childhood photos, wine bottles and metal trinkets take on a life of their own, eluding Ketzia''s frightened grasp. Marked by a logical illogic and disarmingly sane madness, this haunting and innovative fable creates an emotional landscape that''s as impossible to escape as it is for young Ketzia to inhabit.