short fiction; fairy tales; joel hans; issue 16; spring 2023

| By Jaime Goh

[ May 14, 2026 ]

Elegies for an Age of Disenchantment: A Review of Joel Hans’s The Bedtime Emptying of Our World

From lush forests to faraway kingdoms, fairy tales have long taken place in realms where enchantment is native to the landscape. Contemporary fiction, however, often treats enchantment more cautiously, filtering the magical through irony, ambiguity, or psychological realism rather than asking readers to suspend disbelief even temporarily. In his debut story collection The Bedtime Emptying …