Veronica Schanoes Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Veronica Schanoes
Veronica Schanoes is an American author of fantasy stories and an associate professor in the English department at Queens College, CUNY. She earned her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in the year 2007.

Veronica writes speculative fiction, with a special interest in retelling fairy tales, typically with Jewish protagonists.

Her research interests include women’s writing, fairy tales, and fantasy, with particular interest in feminist theory and Jewish representation in speculative fiction.

Her fiction has appeared in anthologies like Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, Year’s Best Fantasy, Horror 21, The Doll Collection, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, as well as Tor.com. Veronica has published scholarship on mirrors in the Harry Potter series and fairy tale revisions.

Her parents are leftists (her dad’s actually a Marxist) and she was raised with a strong sense of leftist values and a comprehension of history. She learned from an early age just how many people died and suffered, and still die and suffer, in order to provide comfortable lives for the few. So she was taught to remember those tales and honor the people that work and fight for justice and human happiness.

So she wrote “Phosphorous” as a reaction against the glamorization of the nineteenth century that she sees all over the place. With clockwork, corsets, suitors, tea, and steam power, and the like. It was a horrible time to be alive for most in England. She wanted to work with something that’d highlight the horrible experience many would have, which is really its most dominant aspect to her, and there’s nothing that makes this clearer than phossy jaw. It was the women (and men) that worked in match factories. The 1888 Matchgirls’s Strike was truly the start of industrial unionism in the UK.

“Burning Girls” started with just a single idea: that somebody should write a revision of “Rumplestiltzkin” that was set in the factories and sweatshops of the Lower East Side around the (second most recent) turn of the century. But she also wanted to write a story set in the garment factories of the Lower East Side, so it’s about immigrant factory workers, since that’s who was there.

She had always said that she would never write historical fiction due to all of the research she was forced to do in her academic career. She did more research writing “Burning Girls” than she has done for most of the academic articles that she has written, and it took her years. She studied various aspects: the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern European pogroms, the Jewish magic tradition, and the experience of immigration for Jewish women during that time. She already had a significant background knowledge regarding the waves of Italian and Jewish immigration 1880-1920 and the Triangle fire.

“Phosphorous”, on the other hand, was a breeze to research. She used one amazing book called “Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and Their Place in History” by Louise Raw that she special ordered from the UK. It is absolutely brilliant, and Raw did amazingly resourceful research for the book. And she had some background knowledge about the Irish Potato Famine, and the story came together rather quickly.

Given that she’s an academic, despite what she may say about how she’d avoid writing historical fiction, it turns out that she really does enjoy doing the research.

Veronica will just write the story, and proceed to cut out all of the unnecessary parts, and it will wind up being the exact length that it needs to be when she has finished. Just as long as it holds the reader through to the end, she is happy.

“Burning Girls” won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in the year 2013, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award. “Burning Girls, and Other Stories” was selected as a Most Anticipated Book in 2021 by The Nerd Daily, The Independent, and Buzzfeed.

“Burning Girls, and Other Stories” is a short story collection that was released in 2021. When they came to America, they brought hunger, anger, and socialism. They also brought their demons.

In “Burning Girls, and Other Stories”, Veronica crosses genres and borders with tales about fierce women at society’s margins burning their way to the center. This is a debut collection which introduces readers to a fantasist in the vein of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, with a voice that is all her own.

Emma Goldman (yeah, that Emma Goldman) takes tea with the Baba Yaga and truths start to unfold inside of some exquisitely crafted lies. In “Among the Thorns”, one young woman in seventeenth century Germany is bound and determined to avenge her peddler dad’s brutal murder, yet learns that vengeance might just consume everything that it touches.

In the showstopper of an awards finalist titular story, called “Burning Girls”, Veronica invests the immigrant narrative with a fearsome fairy tale quality which tells this story about America we might not want, but we do in fact need, to hear.

Precise, dreamy, and dangerous, with the weight of some of the oldest stories that we tell, this book introduces one author that pushes the boundaries of both contemporary fiction and fantasy.

Veronica’s collection is filled with brilliant stories of enviable imagination, that was gracefully written, with a strong feminist core. This is a book for readers that love their fairy tales dark and strong, while Veronica masterfully blends myth, fantasy, folklore, and history into some fascinating and odd configurations. It features stories of fury and vengeance, stories of grit and wit. There are many surprises and many pleasures throughout, and some readers found it to be unconventional, experimental, and haunting.

Her writing practically sings off the page and the tales emerge just like the hydra, and is an amalgamation of the sinister, dark, and magical.

Veronica is one of the most powerful voices in all of speculative fiction and has been for a long time. Her work effortlessly blends the archetypal with the modern, and it is endlessly rich, and horribly needed.