Fairy Tale Depravity

Ellen Datlow just alerted me to an interesting article published in The Guardian on June 29. It seems that a story from our Snow White, Blood Red anthology (a collection of re-told fairy tales for adult readers) has been denounced in the state-owned al-Akhbar newspaper in Egypt. Gracious! That's a first for us.

The offending story is Tanith Lee's "Snow-drop," an Angela-Carter-esque retelling of Snow White.

"It was on the reading list of a fantasy fiction course offered to final-year students during the first term of this academic year, 2010-2011," says The Guardian. "The short story, according to the al-Akhbar journalist, teaches nothing but depravity and moral degradation. It encourages perversion and is therefore 'a crime in the full sense of the word'. Brandishing his moral sword, he threatened to file a complaint of moral corruption to the public prosecutor and to sue all those involved in allowing this short story to corrupt innocent minds."

The power of fairy tales indeed.