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.

A sampling from the anthology: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” by Holly Black, “Sleeping Beauty” by Neil Gaiman, The Brothers Grimm’s “Rumpelstiltskin” by Kami Garcia, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening by Melissa Marr to Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” by Garth Nix, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto by Margaret Stohl.

Kami Garcia’s story, “Soul Collector” is a retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin” in the world of organized crime.