From my review of Angela Woodward's Natural Wonders, now available at Full Stop:

It would seem that many of the more adventurous younger women writers right now are tending toward a kind of undisguised fabulism as their chosen form of departure from conventional practice. Writers like Joanna Ruocco, Danielle Dutton, and Helen Oyeyemi create fanciful, dreamlike worlds that suggest fables and fairy tales as their apparent inspiration, although it is the ambience and mannerisms of allegorical fantasy that this fiction seeks to incorporate, not the underlying symbolic structure that allows an allegorical narrative to abstract a higher level of meaning (“the moral of the story”). In this sort of experimental fabulism, the main object of subversion is “realism” conceived as fidelity to reality in its familiar aspect, subject to the known laws of causation, and in the fiction of the neofabulists this reality is freely transformed through the unfettered exercise of imagination.