Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit on Writing a Liberated Cinderella

Rebecca Solnit’s Cinderella Liberator, her retelling of the classic fairytale for today’s kids, shows a new version of the story in which “nobody gets married, nobody becomes a princess, the prince needs liberation too.” Her goal was to portray “a really active role for Cinderella in participating in the changing of her life and the changing of the beings around her, rather than the passive little girl waiting to be turned into a fairy princess,” she says in a new video (below) from publisher Haymarket Books.

The book, which comes out May 7, features illustrations by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), whose work has accompanied a number of children’s fairytales. Watch the video above for more from Solnit.

More from Literary Hub

Literary Hub6 min read
The Bounce Song That Launched a Thousand Bounce Songs
The last semester of eighth grade, right before my thirteenth birthday, my life changed for two reasons. One, the first Bounce song came out. And two? Well, we’ll get to that. Dances were the only part of school I took any pleasure in. It was January
Literary Hub13 min read
Real Talk: On Claudia Rankine’s Painful Conversations with Whiteness
Three quarters of the way through Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine considers three different understandings of the word “conversation.” The first, from a Latinx artist (unnamed) discussing her reluctance to play oppression Olympics
Literary Hub3 min readPolitical Ideologies
The Fight for Conservatism Today
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequenc

Related Books & Audiobooks