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The Swan Suit
Blending banalities of everyday human routines and dilemmas with elements of fairy tales, magic, the macabre and the downright inventive, Katherine Fawcett’s fiction is anything but predictable.
In this collection, reimagined folktales appear alongside stories entirely new, serving to defamiliarize us from the undeniably odd tales we continue to pass down generation after generation, and lend a vague familiarity to the stories of Fawcett’s invention.
One of the three little pigs launches a line of high-end, easy-to-prepare, wolf broth–based meals. The Devil is on a mission to steal a child’s soul, but is distracted when he develops a massive crush on the day-care worker. A man stands in the shower contemplating his future when he discovers tiny mushrooms growing in his body’s various nooks and crannies.
Fawcett’s wry humour and prodigious imagination are an addictive mix. The weird becomes normal, and the normal, fascinating. Subverting expectations at every turn, her matter-of-fact style and narrative skill make this collection a must-read for any lover of short fiction.
In this collection, reimagined folktales appear alongside stories entirely new, serving to defamiliarize us from the undeniably odd tales we continue to pass down generation after generation, and lend a vague familiarity to the stories of Fawcett’s invention.
One of the three little pigs launches a line of high-end, easy-to-prepare, wolf broth–based meals. The Devil is on a mission to steal a child’s soul, but is distracted when he develops a massive crush on the day-care worker. A man stands in the shower contemplating his future when he discovers tiny mushrooms growing in his body’s various nooks and crannies.
Fawcett’s wry humour and prodigious imagination are an addictive mix. The weird becomes normal, and the normal, fascinating. Subverting expectations at every turn, her matter-of-fact style and narrative skill make this collection a must-read for any lover of short fiction.
- GenresCanadaShort Stories
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2020
11 people are currently reading
339 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
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November 15, 2020I’ve read this book over 100 times. Sure, I may be biased but I think it's pretty good. Five stars. Why not. Here's a link to a trailer my publisher created for this book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebdE...
April 9, 2020
These stories make you think because they take what you’ve always known about our familiar fairy tales and subvert the hell out of them. Literally.
The Three Little Pigs go into business with hilarious results, princesses stand up and refuse to be victims anymore, and a mother witch offers tough-love parenting advice.
Although each of the stories has a darkness to them, they all have humour. In the story Swan Suit, a woman complains the zip-off swan suit “was more complicated to fold than a fitted sheet.”
In The Devil and Miss Nora, the Devil is meant to be gathering a soul, but gets sidetracked by falling for a cheery daycare worker. He misinterprets everything she says, and thinks, “This was going to be as easy as negotiating a deal with an intermediate-level guitar player.” Later the Devil makes this thoughtful observation: “But the thing with the very young was that they didn’t have regrets or bucket lists or the desire to change themselves. And any desires they did have were realistic and simple enough that they didn’t need to sell their souls for them...”
My favourite is The Pull of Old Rat Creek in which a woman becomes “magnetic”, so that everything metal sticks to her. She becomes a massive and unrecognizable tourist attraction. Her life is entertainment for everyone else, but a tragedy for her. I had a lump in my throat reading her story; I wanted her to be saved, I wanted our world to be saved.
I’m a sucker for metaphors and Fawcett sneaks them so you don’t even notice. Her writing style is conversational, lippy, witty and weird. Perfect for these quirky stories that leave you thinking about their characters long after you’ve finished the book.
The Three Little Pigs go into business with hilarious results, princesses stand up and refuse to be victims anymore, and a mother witch offers tough-love parenting advice.
Although each of the stories has a darkness to them, they all have humour. In the story Swan Suit, a woman complains the zip-off swan suit “was more complicated to fold than a fitted sheet.”
In The Devil and Miss Nora, the Devil is meant to be gathering a soul, but gets sidetracked by falling for a cheery daycare worker. He misinterprets everything she says, and thinks, “This was going to be as easy as negotiating a deal with an intermediate-level guitar player.” Later the Devil makes this thoughtful observation: “But the thing with the very young was that they didn’t have regrets or bucket lists or the desire to change themselves. And any desires they did have were realistic and simple enough that they didn’t need to sell their souls for them...”
My favourite is The Pull of Old Rat Creek in which a woman becomes “magnetic”, so that everything metal sticks to her. She becomes a massive and unrecognizable tourist attraction. Her life is entertainment for everyone else, but a tragedy for her. I had a lump in my throat reading her story; I wanted her to be saved, I wanted our world to be saved.
I’m a sucker for metaphors and Fawcett sneaks them so you don’t even notice. Her writing style is conversational, lippy, witty and weird. Perfect for these quirky stories that leave you thinking about their characters long after you’ve finished the book.
April 7, 2020
Fun spicy read. A cocktail party of stories, you definitely want to mingle and read them all- very flirty - like flirting with death, disgust and discomfort - not so much the lovely kind. So great to read.
March 28, 2020
Love the quirky short stories that throw you for a loop in a charming yet whimsical sort of way.
November 12, 2021
I had the chance to hear Katherine read two of the stories in this collection and that was enough to get me to want to buy it immediately! An incredible, wonderful, and weird collection!
September 21, 2021
Originally reviewed by Kat Cameron for Prairie Fire's Book Reviews Program. prairiefire.ca
Every short story collection should have one perfect story that the reader returns to over and over. Even if some of the other stories are ho-hum, that one perfect story remains in the mind.
Through sheer luck, the first story I read in Katherine Fawcett’s second collection of short stories, The Swan Suit, is that perfect story: “East O,” told from the point of view of an egg in an unnamed woman’s ovary. Clever, engaging, and original, “East O” made me marvel at what can be accomplished with a witty first-person narrator.
Several stories in The Swan Skin conjure Angela Carter—the retelling of fairy tales, the stark exploration of sexual politics. In “Happy” a woman tires of sex after thirty-two years of marriage—“Babs yearned for a life of celibacy and contemplation” (212)—and progressively seals up all her orifices with caulking, Gorilla Glue, and duct tape. “The Virgin and the Troll” is a modern bawdy twist on Rumpelstiltskin, complete with a king who needs money for a music festival and a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old virgin. When she hears that her father told the king she could spin straw into gold, she says, “My dad told you that I could spin straw? Into fucking gold? I can’t even sew a button onto a burlap sack” (100). The father seems more concerned with his daughter’s honour than her happiness, but the daughter has different plans.
The title story examines the power dynamics of appearance and identity. A fisherman who steals a shape-shifter’s swan suit is a mama’s boy who “always felt uncomfortable in his own skin around [women]” (14); his mother is a former beauty queen who doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, but knows deep down, she’s “still the same, but there’s something new about the shape of space [she takes] up in the world” (20). The story explores the choices embodied in outer appearance, proposing that “skin, fur, and feathers are simply costumes” (28).
Fawcett turns to humour and social commentary in “Ham,” which features one of the three little pigs as an entrepreneur who markets a line of “wolf-broth-based organic meals” (113) through his company Chinny-Chin-Chin Organics, a company that says “no to victim mentality” (114). Referencing contemporary trends from Twitter hashtags to GoFundMe pages, Fawcett explores Ham’s “rags to riches to scandal to born-again family man” (123) arc, ending with ten questions for discussion, including a mention of Ham’s memoir, Happy at Last: Finding Joy in a Straw House.
Surprisingly, Ham, the ruthless entrepreneur, is one of the more sympathetic characters. Several of Fawcett’s characters are sketched in harsh lines. In “The Devil and Miss Nora,” the Devil, searching for children’s souls, meets his match in a multi-level-marketing kindergarten teacher; in “Mary’s Wonderful New Grimoire,” a dying witch “exhales green smoke that smells like rancid poultry and burnt hair” (125) while her vegetarian daughter, dressed in pastels, is only at her mother’s deathbed to destroy her grimoire. Nick, the fired sales manager in “Mycology,” finds mushrooms growing on his penis when he is showering. I read this story a few times, trying to keep track of the different characters wandering in and out of Nick’s bathroom and to discern the meaning of the mushrooms. Nick wonders if the mushrooms are a miracle or an STD or a sign “his insides had completely gone to shit’ (194). Like Nick, I’m still not sure what the mushrooms mean.
Balanced against the slightly confusing “Mycology” is “The Pull of Old Rat Creek,” an engaging tale told through fortune cookies, emails, texts, whiteboard messages, iPhone transcriptions, Facebook posts, Health and Safety Incident files, and articles from CBC and The Weekly Ratter. Taking an X-Files approach, the story tracks the experiences of Margery Perkins, an overweight single mother who becomes physically attracted to metal after an incident on a railway track involving an aluminum foil wrapping on a spring roll and two passing trains loaded with iron ore and magnetic coal. The different mediums blend well and the story has one of the collection’s more surprising endings.
The Swan Suit experiments with fairy-tale parody, bizarre humour, and the grotesque, blending witty dialogue with cultural observations. If for no other reason, read this collection for the voice of the egg in “East O.”
The Swan Suit was shortlisted for the 2021 Relit Awards.
Every short story collection should have one perfect story that the reader returns to over and over. Even if some of the other stories are ho-hum, that one perfect story remains in the mind.
Through sheer luck, the first story I read in Katherine Fawcett’s second collection of short stories, The Swan Suit, is that perfect story: “East O,” told from the point of view of an egg in an unnamed woman’s ovary. Clever, engaging, and original, “East O” made me marvel at what can be accomplished with a witty first-person narrator.
Several stories in The Swan Skin conjure Angela Carter—the retelling of fairy tales, the stark exploration of sexual politics. In “Happy” a woman tires of sex after thirty-two years of marriage—“Babs yearned for a life of celibacy and contemplation” (212)—and progressively seals up all her orifices with caulking, Gorilla Glue, and duct tape. “The Virgin and the Troll” is a modern bawdy twist on Rumpelstiltskin, complete with a king who needs money for a music festival and a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old virgin. When she hears that her father told the king she could spin straw into gold, she says, “My dad told you that I could spin straw? Into fucking gold? I can’t even sew a button onto a burlap sack” (100). The father seems more concerned with his daughter’s honour than her happiness, but the daughter has different plans.
The title story examines the power dynamics of appearance and identity. A fisherman who steals a shape-shifter’s swan suit is a mama’s boy who “always felt uncomfortable in his own skin around [women]” (14); his mother is a former beauty queen who doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror, but knows deep down, she’s “still the same, but there’s something new about the shape of space [she takes] up in the world” (20). The story explores the choices embodied in outer appearance, proposing that “skin, fur, and feathers are simply costumes” (28).
Fawcett turns to humour and social commentary in “Ham,” which features one of the three little pigs as an entrepreneur who markets a line of “wolf-broth-based organic meals” (113) through his company Chinny-Chin-Chin Organics, a company that says “no to victim mentality” (114). Referencing contemporary trends from Twitter hashtags to GoFundMe pages, Fawcett explores Ham’s “rags to riches to scandal to born-again family man” (123) arc, ending with ten questions for discussion, including a mention of Ham’s memoir, Happy at Last: Finding Joy in a Straw House.
Surprisingly, Ham, the ruthless entrepreneur, is one of the more sympathetic characters. Several of Fawcett’s characters are sketched in harsh lines. In “The Devil and Miss Nora,” the Devil, searching for children’s souls, meets his match in a multi-level-marketing kindergarten teacher; in “Mary’s Wonderful New Grimoire,” a dying witch “exhales green smoke that smells like rancid poultry and burnt hair” (125) while her vegetarian daughter, dressed in pastels, is only at her mother’s deathbed to destroy her grimoire. Nick, the fired sales manager in “Mycology,” finds mushrooms growing on his penis when he is showering. I read this story a few times, trying to keep track of the different characters wandering in and out of Nick’s bathroom and to discern the meaning of the mushrooms. Nick wonders if the mushrooms are a miracle or an STD or a sign “his insides had completely gone to shit’ (194). Like Nick, I’m still not sure what the mushrooms mean.
Balanced against the slightly confusing “Mycology” is “The Pull of Old Rat Creek,” an engaging tale told through fortune cookies, emails, texts, whiteboard messages, iPhone transcriptions, Facebook posts, Health and Safety Incident files, and articles from CBC and The Weekly Ratter. Taking an X-Files approach, the story tracks the experiences of Margery Perkins, an overweight single mother who becomes physically attracted to metal after an incident on a railway track involving an aluminum foil wrapping on a spring roll and two passing trains loaded with iron ore and magnetic coal. The different mediums blend well and the story has one of the collection’s more surprising endings.
The Swan Suit experiments with fairy-tale parody, bizarre humour, and the grotesque, blending witty dialogue with cultural observations. If for no other reason, read this collection for the voice of the egg in “East O.”
The Swan Suit was shortlisted for the 2021 Relit Awards.
April 5, 2020
I have been looking forward to reading this collection of short stories for quite some time and was not disappointed. I'm not normally a big short story reader but found this book so compelling and engaging I couldn't put it down and inhaled the whole collection in a weekend at home. Each surreal story is peppered with surprises, twists, brilliant and often hilarious details. My favourite story is tied between East O, a story told from a morbidly refreshing perspective, and Mycology--a story about a man facing an internal crisis who is also coming to terms with his aging body in a distinctively clever, and memorable way. Enjoy the escape of this wonderful collection.
April 9, 2020
I read the amazing short stories in this book over 3 evenings. They were astonishing, not just in the excellent writing, but also in their clever, witty, compelling ability to take a fable and spin it into an entirely new and riveting, unexpected direction.
Magical, funny, relevant, and thoughtful. Katherine Fawcett is a gifted writer. Highly recommend.
Magical, funny, relevant, and thoughtful. Katherine Fawcett is a gifted writer. Highly recommend.
March 28, 2020
Katherine Fawcett's second collection of short stories is as endearing, surprising and engaging as her first, "The Little Washer of Sorrows." Whether the story is a new look at an old tale, like "Ham" does for story of "The Three Little Pigs," or a completely new perspective as in "East O", a story narrated from an ovum's point of view, Fawcett has a way of looking at something completely recognizable and turning it on its head. But even though the stories are fantastic (not fantasy!), they speak to real human emotions, dreams and fears. Oh, and you'll laugh out loud over and over. Fawcett has the gift of all good storytellers: she can make the mundane extraordinary.
April 1, 2020
The stories were interesting, captivating, and perfect for reading aloud to family and friends as well as a late night to keep you up. Definitely recommend!
March 29, 2020
I love this book! I'm not usually a huge fan of short stories, but Katherine Fawcett's stories are funny, fast-paced, and leave you thinking at the end. Her clever, modern takes on fairytales and folktales had me laughing out loud, but also gasping at her use beautiful images and thoughtful metaphors. Highly recommended!
March 28, 2020
Another fabulous collection of short stories from Katherine Fawcett - I ordered a copy just in time to self-isolate, and it is the perfect companion; witty, irreverent, with some oddball twists, ready to sit with me and a cup of tea or glass of wine and entertain me in these dark times. I highly recommend reading!
March 29, 2020
In these weird days of isolation due to Covid19, do yourself a favour and read this wildly hilarious (you will laugh out loud and be thankful to be isolated so nobody sees the tea spew out of your nose) and thought provoking (how can one's imagination conjure up these stories??) collection.
March 29, 2020
These stories are infused with Katherine's signature humour and imagination and at the same time reflect the human condition in subtle and knowing ways. An enjoyable read meant to be savoured.
May 17, 2020
Reading The Swan Suit is a bit like taking the elevator drop ride at Disneyland. You think you know what to expect. You'll go up, then down, right? Indeed, the stories feel familiar, like a fairy tale or myths you were told in childhood. But do you go up? No! Suddenly you're not going up or down but backwards at full tilt, laughing your head off at The Devil being duped, an unpleasant fisherman's mother getting her twisted comeuppance, or one woman's sudden quasi-superhero ability to attract metal objects. And as soon as you think you've got a grasp on the style, you whiz down, into the subterranean depths of the psyche - to swirl amongst stories that examine ordinary lives in psychedelic circumstances. Katherine Fawcett's stories are entertaining, surprising, hilarious, and thought-provoking.
June 1, 2020
Katherine's writing makes me want to transplant her brain into my head so that I can make use of her striking word choice and wildly entertaining imagination. This is a savvy, quirky collection of fairytales grounded in reality - so much so, that I began to wonder if some of them hadn't happened in real life. From hairballs and witches to spontaneous magnetism, these stories brought a cast of rich, dissatisfied characters to life. None of them approach that dissatisfaction in the way I expected, and that's what makes The Swan Suit such a wild, enjoyable ride.
May 6, 2020
Extraordinary. A sense of wonder accompanies the reader on a journey through these stories. After Little Washer of Sorrows (make sure to read that, too), I knew I'd suspend my disbelief at the first paragraphs and slip right in. Turning these pages through Katherine Fawcett's mind, discovering fairy tales for the second first time, is what reading (at least some of the time) should be about.
September 23, 2020
I loved this book. I loved fairy tales as a kid and really liked how the author brought them to modern day and the Canadian references were charming
May 2, 2020
The allure of short fiction is you can read one story, put the book down, and go for a walk with all the yearning and sweetness and outright fright woven into your meanderings. The stories in The Swan Suit are all of these. Wonderful and creative. Intimate and swerving. Plain and eccentric. They are adult fairy tales until they're not. And the result is a hefty and buoyant trip into the mysteries of life. You can't read just one!
June 14, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of subversive and clever fairy tales.
Some of my favourites were "Ham" - felt like very relevant and hilarious social commentary.
I also really liked "East O" - that story just felt like a very alive coming of age story that fascinated me.
I loved the new twist on Rumpelstiltskin.
"Mycology" was weird and gross, but still kind of funny.
Great storytelling! I enjoyed this book much more than I expected from the ugly-ish cover.
Some of my favourites were "Ham" - felt like very relevant and hilarious social commentary.
I also really liked "East O" - that story just felt like a very alive coming of age story that fascinated me.
I loved the new twist on Rumpelstiltskin.
"Mycology" was weird and gross, but still kind of funny.
Great storytelling! I enjoyed this book much more than I expected from the ugly-ish cover.
May 6, 2020
Katherine Fawcett had a spectacular way of welcoming you into the every day life of a character and adding a drop of magic that twists it into a daliesque tale.
I find I don't read much these days but these short stories of Katherine's are perfect bite-sized escapades, like looking at a fairy tale through a kaleidoscope.
I find I don't read much these days but these short stories of Katherine's are perfect bite-sized escapades, like looking at a fairy tale through a kaleidoscope.
May 8, 2023
One of the best things I've read in a long time! Katherine's short stories are beautifully written, captivating, witty, and thought-provoking. I've been yearning for a book that is different and unpredictable, and The Swan Suit is definitely it. Her dark and humorous spin on folktales is exciting and a definite page-turner. 5/5!
December 21, 2020
Fun book with some twists on a couple of fairytales.
June 12, 2022
Ham and The Swan Suit are my stand-out favourites.
May 5, 2020
Loved this collection of short stories.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews