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.
Meh. That's the overall feeling I have for this particular collection of stories. There are some stories in this book that I really liked, but overall, this was just an okay compilation.
The premise was for authors to take a "timeless" story and retell it, either in a completely new way, or at least slightly changed. Some of these stories I would consider "timeless" but there were some odd choices in this bunch - some stories that I had never heard of, so I wouldn't consider them "timeless." For instance - Gene Wolfe chose a story that, in his own words, is "one of those wonderful stories we have utterly forgotten." I would like to call this book out on it's "New Twists on Timeless Tales" claim. If I hadn't read a story before, I tried to track it down and read it first, so I'd understand how the author re-imagined the story.
For the most part, these stories were very old, a lot of them in the Public Domain, so it wasn't hard. For Gene Wolfe's story, the "White Werewolf of the Saraban" I couldn't even Google it and get it's origin. It is so obscure a story it's only been published in one book - a compilation by Boris Karloff of all people - and it's worth a pretty penny if you want to own it. So, I didn't much appreciate being led to believe these stories were recognizable in any way.
What I'd like to sum up is that this book has a few choice authors that I really like and made me interested in reading this story - Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix,
Rick Yancey - but the majority of the stories, other than theirs, were just so-so. I wouldn't pick this book up again, and I wouldn't suggest it to someone unless I really knew they liked short stories or a majority of these authors.
Meh. That's the overall feeling I have for this particular collection of stories. There are some stories in this book that I really liked, but overall, this was just an okay compilation.The premise was for authors to take a "timeless" story and retell it, either in a completely new way, or at least slightly changed. Some of these stories I would consider "timeless" but there were some odd choices in this bunch - some stories that I had never heard of, so I wouldn't consider them "timeless." For instance - Gene Wolfe chose a story that, in his own words, is "one of those wonderful stories we have utterly forgotten." I would like to call this book out on it's "New Twists on Timeless Tales" claim. If I hadn't read a story before, I tried to track it down and read it first, so I'd understand how the author re-imagined the story.
For the most part, these stories were very old, a lot of them in the Public Domain, so it wasn't hard. For Gene Wolfe's story, the "White Werewolf of the Saraban" I couldn't even Google it and get it's origin. It is so obscure a story it's only been published in one book - a compilation by Boris Karloff of all people - and it's worth a pretty penny if you want to own it. So, I didn't much appreciate being led to believe these stories were recognizable in any way.
What I'd like to sum up is that this book has a few choice authors that I really like and made me interested in reading this story - Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix,
Rick Yancey - but the majority of the stories, other than theirs, were just so-so. I wouldn't pick this book up again, and I wouldn't suggest it to someone unless I really knew they liked short stories or a majority of these authors.
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