The best writers of our generation retell the classics. Literature is filled with sexy, deadly, and downright twisted tales. In this collection, award-winning and bestselling authors reimagine their favorite classic stories, ones that have inspired, awed, and enraged them; ones that have become ingrained in modern culture; and ones that have been too long overlooked. They take these stories and boil them down to their bones, and then reassemble them for a new generation of readers. Today's most acclaimed authors use their own unique styles to rebuild these 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
