Fairy Tale Review — Kate Bernheimer

The Translucent Issue is a break from tradition. In some ways, colors are an easier, more obvious entry point into the world of fairy tales. It is not transparent, and thus never explicit on the page -- the Brothers Grimm rarely editorialized -- but then again psychology is rarely explicit. It is a partial view, one that permits shape and light, but not clarity, not exactness; it is a half-truth, one that includes what is as often as it includes what could be; it is the fantasy of wish, and the dubious luxury of pretense. Fairy-tale psychology is not clarified through the use of interiority or analysis, but by situation, circumstance. It is illuminated by what is seen and, just as importantly, what is not.