Short stories
Kissing the Witch
Emma Donoghue
Penguin
May 1997
Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances - sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous.
Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire.
Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin.
Astray
Emma Donoghue
Macmillan
October 2012
Counterfeiter. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse.
The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue’s latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master’s wife to set them both free; she draws out the difficulties of gold mining in the Yukon, even in the supposedly plentiful early days, and she takes us to an early Puritan community in Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal.
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
Emma Donoghue
Virago
June 2002
'And if who can tell what's true and what's not true in these times, Mary, why then might not this rabbit story be as true as anything else?'
This book of fictions that are also true is named for Mary Toft, who, in 1726, managed to convince half of England that she'd given birth to rabbits.
Donoghue finds her inspiration for these wry, robust tales in obscure scraps of historical records: an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits; a plague ballad; surgical case notes; theological pamphlets; an articulated skeleton. Here kings, surgeons, soldiers, and ladies of leisure rub shoulders with cross-dressers, cult leaders, poisoners, and arsonists.