Catherynne M Valente Books in Order

Poems and prose bring together witches, emperors, beasts, bodhisattvas, wicked stepmothers, and Greek heroes. Drawing on myths and fairy tales, the collection gives its unruly figures competing voices as they struggle for attention and authority within their stories.

Ancient oracles find their voices across the modern American continent, from New England universities to Hawaiian volcanoes and Chinatown kitchens. These poems imagine prophetic figures speaking for themselves, expressing anger, grief, and wildness beyond their traditional service to gods.

An isolated girl in a palace garden tells a curious prince the stories tattooed on her eyelids. Witches, animal royalty, and living stars populate nested tales whose connections gradually point toward the mysterious storyteller’s own hidden history.

Banished from heaven, Japanese storm god Susanoo wanders the earth in human form, searching for his demonic mother. His journey through a mythic landscape also demands a confrontation with an eight-headed serpent and the legacy of his divine family.

An unraveling woman travels through a conscious maze with no apparent center, boundaries, or exit. Guided by a figure as destructive as helpful, she encounters hostile angels, monstrous prophets, and other surreal obstacles in a journey through language and identity.

Ayako, an elderly woman exiled on a mountain in medieval Japan, inhabits a shifting inner world shaped by solitude. Mythologies, philosophy, mathematics, and memories merge as her dreams redraw the boundaries of reality and her sense of self.

The girl in the palace garden continues telling stories written on her eyelids as a royal wedding threatens her sanctuary. Interwoven journeys through the City of Marrow and a deserted spice city draw closer to her concealed origins.

Poetry, brief fables, and fairy tales revisit ancient and modern myths, exploring wonder and the roles assigned to women. Familiar motifs become new stories of grandmothers, curses, and uneasy magic, where imaginative transformations expose painful human experiences.

Four people marked by loss gain access to an extraordinary city through intimate encounters that leave maps on their skin. A locksmith, beekeeper, bookbinder, and Japanese traveler become drawn into Palimpsest’s strange landscapes and the cost of returning there.

Arthurian legend is retold through the intertwined voices of Arthur, Lancelot, Mordred, and Morgan le Fay. This novella reshapes familiar figures and conflicts through poetic storytelling, moving between playfulness and heartbreak as competing perspectives reveal the myth anew.

Distressed by her fading flowers, Smoky wanders into the familiar woods and becomes lost. A mysterious glow leads her toward a magical meal, where she begins to understand Mabon and the changing season through an unexpected woodland encounter.

A missionary discovers a tree bearing books that tell the history of Prester John’s legendary kingdom. Their intertwined accounts follow a priest’s arrival in a land of impossible creatures and immortality, alongside stories from his wife and a royal nanny.

This collection gathers the first twenty-four monthly stories from Valente’s Omikuji Project, originally mailed to subscribers. Detectives, frost giants, abandoned lunar colonies, and mythic creatures feature in tales accompanied by illustrations contributed by the project’s readers.

Marya Morevna grows up amid revolutionary Russia and becomes entangled with the immortal Koschei. Their relationship draws her into a struggle of desire, power, and death as Russian folklore intersects with the upheavals of twentieth-century history.

Prester John’s half-bird daughter arrives with news of European warfare, drawing his extraordinary kingdom toward the Crusades. As John gathers an army to aid Jerusalem, the Christian authorities who requested help become increasingly disturbed by their unfamiliar allies.

Twelve-year-old September leaves Omaha with the Green Wind and enters Fairyland, where a demanding Marquess sends her after a magical talisman. A book-loving wyvern and a mysterious boy help her navigate a realm threatened by its unpredictable ruler.

This Fairyland prequel follows Mallow’s confrontation with King Goldmouth and her path toward ruling the realm. The Red Wind, Mr. Map, and an assortment of magical companions aid her in an adventure centered on Fairyland’s earlier political struggles.

September returns to Fairyland to discover that its inhabitants are losing both shadows and magic. In the world below, her own shadow rules as Halloween, forcing September to confront a familiar-looking queen unwilling to surrender what she has taken.

Born to a Nevada silver baron and a Crow woman, a mixed-race girl grows up hidden in a world unwilling to accept her. Her cruel stepmother names her Snow White, launching a fairy-tale journey through the harsh American West.

Twenty-six stories and poems range from a high school quarterback who is Coyote to an evolving artificial intelligence. The title tale connects an outcast demon with a New England town, while other pieces revisit folklore, Fairyland, and speculative futures.

Longing to escape ordinary life again, September travels to the moon and reunites with Ell and Saturday. Their new adventure pits them against a powerful, mysterious moon-Yeti whose actions threaten the Fairyland she has come to love.

Stories and poems shaped by Japanese themes explore a dreaming woman, a lovestruck paper lantern, and an impossible video game. The collection includes an artificial-intelligence novella and new tales that connect intimate experience with myth, technology, and supernatural encounters.

More than sixty essays examine fairy tales, fantasy, popular culture, gender, race, and daily life. Valente considers medievalism, domestic technology, recurring mythic figures, and how invented stories help people understand their world and survive its difficulties.

In an alternate solar system shaped by silent cinema and inhabited planets, filmmaker Severin Unck rebels against her father’s Gothic movies by making documentaries. Her investigation of a vanished colony on Venus becomes the center of a troubling mystery.

Zelda Fair longs for a life beyond the one she knows, but pursuing something more leads her into a dangerous contest. Facing a powerful boss and his lovestruck employee Frankie, she becomes entangled in a game with deadly stakes.

Stolen from Fairyland, young troll Hawthorn becomes a human changeling living with a Chicago family. At twelve, he discovers a route home, only to find a transformed realm where his return draws him into a revolution involving other changelings.

September’s unexpected reign is challenged when former Fairyland rulers return to life, each claiming the throne. Her friends propose a race to decide the monarchy, while her parents cross the universe in search of their missing daughter.

The young Brontë siblings are whisked into Glass Town, the imaginary world of their childhood game. Their creations now have lives and dangers of their own, forcing the children to navigate real warfare and a potion capable of reviving the dead.

Six women from an original superhero universe tell the stories usually sacrificed to advance male heroes’ lives. Linked accounts of lost powers, violence, and death reclaim the perspectives of heroines, wives, and girlfriends whose experiences have been pushed aside.

Humanity’s first contact requires participation in a galactic music competition that determines a species’ worthiness to survive. Faded London band Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes must represent Earth, confronting alien tastes and the consequences of an unsuccessful performance.

Fifteen speculative stories visit floating Garbagetown, reinvent Lovecraftian horrors, and follow a disguised glassblower commissioned to create a queen’s eye. Fairyland creatures and other unusual inhabitants face political upheaval, ambition, and the tensions between imagined worlds and personal lives.

Orpheus succeeds in bringing Eurydice back from Hades after her untimely death. This dark retelling begins from that altered outcome, exploring the relationship between the musician and his rescued wife beyond the familiar tragedy of the Greek myth.

On a drowned future Earth, Tetley Abednego loves her floating home of Garbagetown despite the hostility of its residents. A new friendship and a disturbing discovery test her stubborn hope amid the debris of a world ruined by earlier generations.

When Osmo’s mother accidentally kills an intelligent forest creature, an ancient treaty makes him responsible for restitution. With two unlikely companions, he must enter the woodland kingdom of the dead and find a way to protect his town.

The Metagalactic Grand Prix returns, combining music, spectacle, and old interstellar rivalries. With Earth’s fate again tied to the competition, hostile civilizations plot against humanity, forcing its representatives to prove themselves once more before a dangerous galactic audience.

A mysterious door appears above a rural clearing, destroying men who enter while returning women with secrets and unpredictable pregnancies. As strange children are born, those seeking to control the phenomenon threaten women navigating a rapidly changing world.

Sophia believes her marriage and life in Arcadia Gardens are perfect, despite her husband’s frequent absences. Unanswered questions, a forbidden basement, and evasive neighbors gradually unsettle her certainty and draw her toward the secrets beneath her carefully ordered home.

This collection gathers stories spanning ancient India, postwar Leningrad, Mars, and distant worlds. Fairy tales, secret histories, noir mysteries, and imagined games explore encounters between strange societies and intimate lives, from Antarctic mapmakers to filmmakers working beyond Earth.