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