Kissing the Witch

Kissing the Witch is a set of linked short stories by the Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue, first published in 1997 and also issued under the longer title Old Tales in New Skins. A United States paperback followed in 1999.

Its thirteen stories each take a well-known European fairy tale and turn it into something else. Cinderella leaves the prince for the fairy godmother, Beauty finds that the face behind the mask is not so different from her own, and Snow White is woken by desire rather than by a prince. Several of the stories read the old material through feminist and queer eyes, and the women in them tell their own accounts of love, revenge and choosing a path.

Donoghue builds the book as a chain rather than a set of separate pieces: the teller of one story becomes the listener of the next, so the collection moves forward as one long conversation. Nobody in it is named, and the figures are known by epithets and aliases instead. It was her first collection of short stories, following three earlier works of fiction, and it has since been translated into Dutch, Catalan and Italian.