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Books like White Cat, Black Dog

Kelly Link · 2023 · US · fantasy · literary fiction
★ 3.79 Goodreads · 8,106 ratings

Seven fairy tales retold in Link's sideways style, starting with a rich old man, his three sons and a cannabis farm in the Vermont hills run by cats.

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12 books for readers of White Cat, Black Dog

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link · 2005 · US 98% match ★ 3.80 Goodreads · 10,352 ratings
shares: playful, surreal, short stories, fairy tale · uncanny, hopeful

Stories set in a world one step to the side of this one: a convenience store that zombies visit at night, a handbag with a whole village inside it, and a group of friends obsessed with a pirate TV show that may be watching them back.

Get in Trouble

Kelly Link · 2015 · US 98% match ★ 3.67 Goodreads · 13,154 ratings
shares: playful, surreal, short stories · uncanny, hopeful

Nine stories in which ordinary people meet the uncanny, from a girl who keeps house for the uncanny summer people up the hill to a fading star of vampire movies filming a ghost-hunting show.

Gingerbread

Helen Oyeyemi · 2019 · UK 95% match ★ 3.04 Goodreads · 15,937 ratings
shares: playful, fairytale, surreal, fairy tale · uncanny, hopeful

Harriet Lee, whose family gingerbread recipe has a history, tells her teenage daughter about growing up in Druhástrana, a country that may not appear on any map, and the friend she lost there.

Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi · 2011 · UK 95% match ★ 3.57 Goodreads · 11,797 ratings
shares: playful, fairytale, fairy tale · uncanny, low-key

A 1930s novelist who keeps killing off his heroines is challenged by his muse, Mary Foxe, to a game in which they take turns telling stories, while his wife grows suspicious.

Bliss Montage

Ling Ma · 2022 · US 94% match ★ 3.87 Goodreads · 27,765 ratings
shares: eerie, surreal, short stories · uncanny, intimate

Eight surreal stories about women in flight from the past: one lives in a house with her husband and all of her ex-boyfriends, another takes a drug that makes her disappear.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Aimee Bender · 1998 · US 94% match ★ 3.86 Goodreads · 8,130 ratings
shares: fairytale, surreal, short stories · uncanny, intimate

Bender's first collection of short, strange fables, among them a man whose lover is going through reverse evolution and a girl with a hand made of fire.

Spindle's End

Robin McKinley · 2000 · US 94% match ★ 3.82 Goodreads · 25,752 ratings
shares: retelling, fairytale, fairy tale · speculative, easy read

Cursed at her name-day by a wicked fairy, the infant princess is spirited away to a remote village by a young fairy, Katriona, who raises her as an ordinary girl called Rosie, who can talk to animals.

The Last Wish

Andrzej Sapkowski · 1993 · Poland 94% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 439,372 ratings
Book 1 of 9 in The Witcher
shares: retelling, fairytale, short stories, fairy tale · speculative, easy read

Geralt of Rivia, a witcher who hunts monsters for pay, rests at a temple of the goddess Melitele after a hard fight and remembers the jobs that brought him there.

Earth Angel

Madeline Cash · 2022 · US 94% match ★ 3.80 Goodreads · 2,280 ratings
shares: playful, surreal, short stories · low-key, uncanny

Cash's first book, interlinked stories in which rebellious schoolgirls, internet strangers and a biblical plague of talking frogs turn up in a world that is absurd and knows it.

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell · 2006 · US 94% match ★ 3.78 Goodreads · 13,466 ratings
shares: fairytale, surreal, short stories · uncanny, intimate

Debut stories populated by werewolf-girl boarding schools, Minotaur cowboys, and sleep-disordered children in Florida swamps.

Fairy Tales

Hans Christian Andersen · 1835 · Denmark 94% match ★ 4.29 Goodreads · 5,294 ratings
shares: fairytale, short stories, fairy tale · easy read, uncanny

Andersen's stories, from 'The Little Mermaid' and 'The Snow Queen' to 'The Ugly Duckling' and 'The Little Match Girl', fairy tales with a melancholy edge that the Grimms never had.

One Thousand and One Nights

Anonymous · 800 · Iraq 94% match
shares: fairytale, short stories, fairy tale · exterior, uncanny

To stave off her execution, Scheherazade tells the king a new story every night, and her nested tales of jinn, merchants and voyagers become a monument to the power of storytelling.