The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales (The Glass Shoe, The Gingerbread Variations, The Little Match Girl, Don Juan Is a Woman, and the title story, among others), sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication - such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here," Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet." Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality.