This anthology contains fiction for adult readers addressing the dark side of childhood, child abuse, and the road to healing. The book includes fiction, poetry and nonfiction by writers including Lynda Barry, Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Patricia A. McKillip, Lisel Mueller, Joanna Russ, Anne Sexton, Delia Sherman, Will Shetterly, Midori Snyder, Ellen Steiber, Peter Straub, Jane Yolen and many others. Published by Tor Books in 1995, the book placed on the short-list for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.
"As the editor’s own memoir-cum-afterword makes clear, she has herself survived a perilous journey, ultimately establishing herself as an artist, editor, and anthologist in an environment so far removed from her childhood experience that she might as well have emigrated from another planet The Armless Maiden is an exploration, an extremely ambitious use of the fantastic for the most serious of literary purposes, to illuminate the human heart." — The Philadelphia Inquirer
"These fairy tales, ‘new tales spun from the threads of the old,’ plumb the dangers, the pain, the way back to life." — Feminist Bookstore News
The Importance of Stories,
and the work of Charles de Lint:
Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... More>>>
-- Terri Windling, Autumn 2007
which raised money for RAINN (the Rape and Incest Survivor's National Network).
