By now pretty much anyone living in the civilized world has heard of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, an alternative take on The Wizard of Oz, but there are plenty more adaptations of classic tales to explore.
Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (4/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99)
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
The Book of Lost Things: A Novel (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $5.98)
New York Times bestselling author John Connolly’s unique imagination takes readers through the end of innocence into adulthood and beyond in this dark and triumphantly creative novel of grief and loss, loyalty and love, and the redemptive power of stories.
High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book… The Book of Lost Things.
An imaginative tribute to the journey we must all make through the loss of innocence into adulthood, John Connolly’s latest novel is a book for every adult who can recall the moment when childhood began to fade, and for every adult about to face that moment. The Book of Lost Things is a story of hope for all who have lost, and for all who have yet to lose. It is an exhilarating tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.
Publishers Weekly says:
“Thriller writer Connolly (Every Dead Thing) turns from criminal fears to primal fears in this enchanting novel about a 12-year-old English boy, David, who is thrust into a realm where eternal stories and fairy tales assume an often gruesome reality…When a portal to another world opens in time-honored fashion, David enters a land of beasts and monsters where he must undertake a quest if he is to earn his way back out. Connolly echoes many great fairy tales and legends (Little Red Riding Hood, Roland, Hansel and Gretel), but cleverly twists them to his own purposes. Despite horrific elements, this tale is never truly frightening, but is consistently entertaining as David learns lessons of bravery, loyalty and honor that all of us should learn.”
The Looking Glass Wars (4/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99)
The Myth: Alice was an ordinary girl who stepped through the looking glass and entered a fairy-tale world invented by Lewis Carroll in his famous storybook. The Truth: Wonderland is real.
Alyss Heart is the heir to the throne, until her murderous aunt Redd steals the crown and kills Alyss’s parents. To escape Redd, Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, must flee to our world through the Pool of Tears. But in the pool Alyss and Hatter are separated.
Lost and alone in Victorian London, Alyss is befriended by an aspiring author to whom she tells the violent, heartbreaking story of her young life. Yet he gets the story all wrong.
Hatter Madigan knows the truth only too well, and he is searching every corner of our world to find the lost princess and return her to Wonderland so she may battle Redd for her rightful place as the Queen of Hearts.
Briar Rose (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $5)
For Briar Rose, life is anything but a fairy tale. She’s stuck in a small town in deepest Georgia with parents who won’t let her out of their sight, a bunch of small-minded, gossiping neighbours and an evil ex who’s spreading nasty rumours about what she may or may not have done in the back of his car.
She’s tired of it all, so when, on her sixteenth birthday, her parents tell her that she is cursed and will go to sleep for a hundred years when the clock strikes midnight, she’s actually kind of glad to leave it all behind. She says her goodbyes, lies down, and closes her eyes . . . . . . And then she wakes up.
Cold, alone and in the middle of the darkest, most twisted fairy tale she could ever have dreamed of. Now Briar must fight her way out of the story that has been created for her, but she can’t do it alone. She never believed in handsome princes, but now she’s met one her only chance is to put her life in his hands, or there will be no happy ever after and no waking up.
Alice in Deadland Trilogy (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SERIES.
Includes FREE EXCERPTS of the next two titles in the Alice in Deadland Series- Hunting The Snark and Deadland: Untold Stories of Alice in Deadland.
Alice in Deadland was released in November 2011 and quickly became an Amazon.com bestseller, selling more than 50,000 copies in its first three months. It was followed by its sequel, ‘Through The Looking Glass’ and ‘Off With Their Heads’, the prequel to Alice in Deadland. Now, get all three novels in the Alice in Deadland Trilogy in one single omnibus edition and immerse yourself in this bestselling adventure.
Alice in Deadland
Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it’s legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.
Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.
What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.
A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland- a book called Alice in Wonderland.
Through The Looking Glass: Alice in Deadland Book II
More than two years have passed since Alice followed a Biter with bunny ears down a hole, triggering events that forever changed her life and that of everyone in the Deadland. The Red Guards have been fought to a standstill; Alice has restored some measure of peace between humans and Biters; and under Alice, humans have laid the foundations of the first large, organized community since The Rising- a city called Wonderland.
That peace is shattered in a series of vicious Biter attacks and Alice finds herself shunned by the very people she helped liberate. Now she must re-enter the Deadland to unravel this new conspiracy that threatens Wonderland. Doing so will mean coming face to face with her most deadly adversary ever- the Red Queen.
Off With Their Heads: The Prequel to Alice in Deadland
A few months before Alice was born and fifteen years before the dramatic events depicted in Alice in Deadland, there was The Rising. A few days that destroyed human civilization as we know it, reducing much of the world to a radioactive wasteland teeming with hordes of undead Biters and controlled by a shadowy Central Committee.
Off With Their Heads brings to life the final harrowing days of The Rising through four shorts, each depicting events through the eyes of one pivotal character in the Alice in Deadland series. See how Dr. Protima became the Queen of the Biters; feel the pain of a young man’s sacrifice as he becomes the bunny-eared Biter whom Alice later follows down a hole; follow the rise of Chen from a conflicted young Chinese Army officer to a General in the Red Guards; and finally share in the dramatic escape of Alice’s parents from a city overrun by Biters.