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Revisiting Wishbone’s Adventures
I’ve never read Beowulf. But I do know it’s a “tale of high adventure, fights with monsters, and great courage” because I have read Wishbone‘s Beowulf, otherwise known as Be A Wolf! For similar...
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The Scariest Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (And That’s Saying Something)
You can keep your haunted mansions, bloody pickaxes, and phone calls coming from inside the house. When I look for creepy October reading, I turn to the OGs of twisted terror: the Grimm Brothers. It’s...
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8 Novels That Put a Twist On Your Favorite Fairytales
Disney’s latest animated hit, Frozen, offers eye-popping animation, but the plot will be familiar to anyone who knows their fairytales—it’s based on Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 story The Snow Queen...
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5 Classic Tales and Their Modern Alter-Egos (Now with More Zombies and...
Did your favorite classic books go into a phone booth, take off their glasses and reemerge as super-stories!? Well, kinda. But more like a bunch of authors paid homage to these well-known tales by...
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4 Reasons April is an Amazing Month for YA Books
This year, April brings showers, impending flowers, and some young adult fiction so mindblowingly good it’ll spring clean your brain. It’s the best month for YA lit since, well, March. Here are the...
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6 Great YA Retellings of Classics
There’s something magical about retellings, the way they build a brand-new body on old, familiar bones. They can have a change of genre, a change of gender, a change of era, but they always keep a...
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Four Sci-Fi Retellings that Are Even Better than the Originals
It’s a popular cliché that science fiction is just regular fiction…IN SPACE! It certainly doesn’t help that Star Trek was pitched as “Wagon Train…IN SPACE!” and Star Wars is Akira Kurosawa’s “Hidden...
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A Glimpse of the Present in Tsarist Russia With Gregory Maguire’s Egg & Spoon
Wicked scribe Gregory Maguire takes his patented vim, vigor and wit and applies it to Russian folklore in his latest, Egg & Spoon. At times rollicking, the story follows two young girls, Cat and...
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The Fall Dares To Out-Haunt Poe, And Three Other YA Retellings of Classics
As long as there are English classes and mandatory curricula, our teen years will be spent reading more classic literature than we will at any other point in our lives. It makes sense, then, that young...
View Article17 Contemporary Reads Inspired by William Shakespeare
Today the literary world is honoring the life, and death, of William Shakespeare. While his exact birthday isn’t really known, we observe it on April 23, the date he died at age 52. And while there are...
View Article4 Classic Lit-Inspired 90s Movies We Love
The 90s weren’t all grunge rock, Snackwells, and Doc Martens. They were also a golden era for classic-lit inspired movies, each of them given a totally 90s modernizing treatment: Jane Austen met...
View ArticleThe Gap Of Time: Jeanette Winterson Takes On The Winter’s Tale
Taking on Shakespeare would make even the most talented writer pause, but you can’t feel the pause in Jeanette Winterson’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale. Winterson’s masterful new...
View ArticleJane Steele Is the Hard-Edged Jane Eyre You Never Knew You Wanted
Lyndsay Faye is a certifiable meddler in fiction. Her debut novel, Dust and Shadow, pitted Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper in a masterful showdown between a fictional giant and an enigmatic...
View ArticleEligible Author Curtis Sittenfeld Shares Her Top 10 Books for Pride and...
While Jane Austen’s enduringly popular novel of love and manners has been retold time and again, through many different mediums, it’s rare that an author of Curtis Sittenfeld’s stature has taken a...
View ArticleCurtis Sittenfeld’s Austen Update Eligible Explores Modern Pride and Prejudices
And now for something completely different. Well, sort of. Fans of Curtis Sittenfeld have come to expect her deceptively lighthearted skewerings of American culture, from the boarding school drama of...
View ArticleThe Taming of the Shrew Gets a Modern Makeover in Vinegar Girl
Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is the latest in Hogarth’s series of Shakespearean classics retold by contemporary authors. With Vinegar Girl, Tyler (The Amateur Marriage) gives us her take on that classic...
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