“History is a fairy tale”, a subtitle in Veronica Schanoes’s story “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, could almost serve as an epigram for the whole of her first collection,
Burning Girls and Other Stories. Schanoes, who is a scholar of fairy tales, feminism, and Jewish literature and history, brings all of her considerable resources to bear in these 14 stories, which include most of the short fiction she published since 2003. And while there is an occasional tendency to embed snippets of historical lectures as a kind of ballast for her more visceral nightmares – “Truth can be told in any number of ways,” she tells us in the Goldman story – it never mitigates the passion and anger that is the real engine of her fiction. Almost as if to illustrate, the Goldman story begins by offering us alternate fairytale and historical modes of narrative: “Once upon a time there was a girl, the third and youngest daughter of a merchant” begins one paragraph,