Suniti Namjoshi takes the oldest narrative machinery available—fairy tales, classical myths, animal fables, creation stories—and removes the patriarchal screws.

Princes become bait, princesses refuse their assigned passivity, women recognise the supposedly natural order as a rather shabby administrative arrangement. The stories are extremely short, sometimes only a page, but their compression is the point: each begins inside a familiar structure and then turns it just far enough for its buried assumptions to become visible.

First published by the independent Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1981, Feminist Fables was Namjoshi’s first work of fiction and remains the book most closely associated with her. Its feminism is more agile than simple role reversal. Namjoshi is interested in how language, myth and repetition make hierarchy feel inevitable—and in what happens when women, queer figures, animals and monsters stop behaving according to narrative instructions. The wit is dry, the violence often close beneath it, and the morals refuse to settle into slogans.

Susan Trangmar’s dense, strange drawings extend the book’s atmosphere, with bodies and creatures appear caught between taxonomy and transformation. This is a sharp little object from the feminist publishing underground, suited to readers of Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington and revisionist myth—but stranger, leaner and substantially less interested in decorative enchantment. 

Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1984 reprint. Paperback with drawings by Susan Trangmar. Light edge wear and mild page toning; clean, bright and firmly bound