"The best writers of our generation retell classic tales."
From Sir Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," literature is filled with sexy, deadly, and downright twisted tales. In this collection, award-winning and bestselling authors reimagine their favorite classic stories, the ones that have inspired, awed, and enraged them, the ones that have become ingrained in modern culture, and the ones that have been too long overlooked. They take these stories and boil them down to their bones, and reassemble them for a new generation of readers.
Written from a twenty-first century perspective and set within the realms of science fiction, dystopian fiction, fantasy, and realistic fiction, these short stories are as moving and thought provoking as their originators. They pay homage to groundbreaking literary achievements of the past while celebrating each author's unique perception and innovative style.
Today's most acclaimed authors use their own unique styles to rebuild the twelve timeless stories:
Sir Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" - Saladin Ahmed
W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" - Kelley Armstrong
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" - Holly Black
"Sleeping Beauty" - Neil Gaiman
The Brothers Grimm's "Rumpelstiltskin" - Kami Garcia
Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" - Melissa Marr
Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" - Garth Nix
Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" - Tim Pratt
E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" - Carrie Ryan
Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" - Margaret Stohl
William Seabrook's "The Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban" - Gene Wolfe
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birth-Mark" - Rick Yancey
And six illustrations by Charles Vess
About the Author: Melissa Marr is the "New York Times "bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series. The series has sold in 24 languages to date, appeared on bestseller lists abroad, and is in development with Universal Studios for a major motion picture. She is also the co-author (with Kelley Armstrong) of the upcoming Blackwell Pages and co-editor (with Armstrong) of the forthcoming YA anthologies, "Enthralled "(2011) and"Entrapped "(2013).
Tim Pratt is a Hugo Award-winning science fiction and fantasy author whose works have been nominated for most of the major genre awards. His stories have been reprinted in numerous Year's Best anthologies, including the Best American Short Stories. He is a senior editor at"Locus," the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, and edited the 2010 anthology "Sympathy for the Devil."