Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize winner for The Hours) takes a fresh and dark look at a selection of classic fairy tales with A Wild Swan: And Other Tales. His brief, richly imagined new stories, often based only loosely on their models, are accompanied by detailed, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations by Yuko Shimizu.

Here readers will find the "crazy old lady" who lures Hansel and Gretel to her cottage of candy in the woods; but Hansel and Gretel are pierced and tattooed, and sexy "with their starved and foxy faces." Snow White's prince is obsessed with the beautiful deathly version of her he discovered in the coffin, and troublingly insists on replaying the scene over and over again. Rumpelstiltskin is surprisingly well intentioned--for the most part. Rapunzel's life following the closure of the Grimms' tale is revealed, and it's a good thing she kept her severed braids. The Beast has grown to be a bad boy, even after Beauty gives him her love. And in the title story, the princess is successful in transforming all of her brothers but one back to their fully human forms.

Cunningham sometimes brings these stories into more or less modern times, but the point of this collection is not to recast the classics with smartphones and fast cars, and some of the settings remain unchanged. Rather, these are playful riffs on well-known stories, almost always with a still gloomier tone than even the Brothers Grimm applied. These tales are not always for the kids, of course, but have an appealing mix of dark humor and nostalgia for timeless stories. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In 1932, the publication of Josep Maria de Sagarra's Private Life--boldly depicting the decline of the aristocracy in Barcelona--caused a scandal in Spain. The sprawling plot is a serpents' nest of entangled motives and schemes centering on three generations of the Lloberolas. Once wealthy, they are now down on their luck and selling off heirlooms. Don Tomas is the head of the family, and his two sons, Frederic and Guillem, are the primary plot-movers. Frederic is a big-scale bungler, and has ended up with a promissory note he can't pay. His younger brother is far brighter--the book's most fascinating character. Cunning and attractive, casually self-serving, the young schemer disguises himself as a ditch digger and goes to a scandalous meeting-place where he is hired to be the lower-class sexual plaything of an aristocratic couple.

Sagarra never hesitates to remind the reader that he has no romantic illusions about desire and attraction. "No matter what the storybooks say, the exercise of love is monotonous." Occasionally the novel is wildly funny, as when Frederic delivers a powerful speech "on the grandeur and decadence of human vanity" to a white spotted cow while she munches on grass.

As Private Life incrementally edges toward a tragic climax, Sagarra plays with the reader, never going where he seems to be heading, presenting a huge, sprawling patchwork fitted together into a mosaic of the end of the aristocratic age. In lusciously exact language, Sagarra painstakingly charts the misunderstandings and crossed signals of privileged human beings greedily, selfishly determined to be happy. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

The Christmas season is ripe for mysteries and ghost stories, like Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and the holiday adventures of Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. A connoisseur of British crime fiction, Martin Edwards has collected 16 short stories from the genre's Golden Age in his third mystery anthology, Silent Nights.

Edwards (The Golden Age of Murder) includes a few classic pieces by well-known authors, notably Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" and stories by G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. But the collection also includes less familiar names such as Ralph Plummer, H.C. Bailey and Ethel Lina White. Eager to provide fresh material for even the most diehard mystery fans, Edwards has done a bit of sleuthing himself, tracking down one or two stories that have never been anthologized.

Each piece is prefaced by a brief introduction to the author and his or her work, which is especially helpful for the book's more obscure contributors. Many of the pieces (as Edwards admits) are festive in setting only: jewel theft and murder at country-house parties and a sinister collection of waxworks are hardly traditional Christmas fare. But the stories provide a varied and entertaining glimpse into Golden Age crime fiction, and may prompt readers to seek out more work by authors who are new to them.

A bit uneven in quality, but still moody and atmospheric, Silent Nights will amuse and satisfy mystery lovers who like a little murder with their eggnog. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Despite her somewhat frivolous-sounding name, Bibi Blair, the 22-year-old protagonist of Ashley Bell, is determined to make it clear that she is fierce and dauntless. Engaged to a Navy SEAL currently on an unspecified mission in an unspecified country, she's learned a thing or two about what it means to be strong after being diagnosed with brain cancer and told she has less than a year to live.

To the delight of her parents (and shock of her doctors), Bibi quickly overcomes her cancer: she wakes from a deep sleep miraculously and mysteriously cured. But she does not want to live without understanding the why and how of it. Her persistence and search for enlightenment sets Koontz's novel on a fascinating exploration of destiny that is heart-pounding and mind-boggling.

After her release from the hospital, Bibi meets with a masseuse-turned-mystic, who convinces her that her life was spared in order to allow her to save the life of another--Ashley Bell. With no idea who Ashley Bell is, what (or whom) she needs saving from, or where she might be, Bibi is left confused but more determined than ever to find answers.

Koontz (Innocence) is a masterful plotter, capable of juggling the many threads of this story without losing sight of the whole. There are many strands: neo-Nazism, details of Bibi's past, a wobbling sense of reality, the story of her SEAL fiance's mission. But Koontz knows how to captivate and surprise. Ashley Bell is a rarity of a thriller--one that asks big questions about life and destiny while succeeding in creating such an eerie sense of reality that sleeping with the lights on might seem like a sane idea. --Kerry McHugh

After a brief career in Parliament, gentleman sleuth Charles Lenox is finally enjoying some prosperity as a partner in his own detective agency. When a German pianist disappears after a spectacular performance at a London concert hall, Lenox and his two partners hope to convince Scotland Yard to call them in on the case. But before they can begin investigating, Lenox is called away to spend a few days at his childhood home in Sussex with his recently widowed brother, Edmund.

In his ninth Charles Lenox novel, Home by Nightfall, Charles Finch (The Laws of Murder) again paints a richly detailed portrait of daily life and crime solving in 1870s England. While keeping up with the case in London, the Lenox brothers find themselves drawn into a puzzling series of events in the village of Markethouse: a break-in, an eerie drawing chalked on a doorstep, a spurious telegram. Lenox welcomes the case as both an intellectual challenge and a means to distract Edmund from his grief, but the clues refuse to add up. When the village's mayor is viciously attacked, the brothers must solve the case before the assassin strikes again. Meanwhile, Lenox's agency partners are worried someone is trying to undercut their business from the inside.

As ever, Lenox is a thoughtful, honorable man, quietly determined to bring about justice for the victims of crime. Although both cases have rather unconventional endings, Home by Nightfall is a satisfying and well-plotted entry in Lenox's--and Finch's--detective career. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

During the early 1900s, polar exploration was "the height of fashion and public interest--the era when... dangerous journeys to the remote regions of the planet were part sporting event and part scientific expedition, draped in a cloak of nationalism." One of those voyagers was Knud Rasmussen, a part-Inuit, part-Danish explorer who was as curious about the people he encountered in his travels as he was about the surrounding landscape. In White Eskimo, historian Stephen R. Bown (The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen) takes readers into the frozen landscape of Greenland, where Rasmussen was born, and examines the life and trips he made in Greenland and across the Arctic.

Because he was part Inuit, the native people of Greenland embraced Rasmussen as one of their own. They were willing to teach him their songs and dances, myth-filled stories and aspects of daily life that other explorers were not privy to, giving Rasmussen insight into the culture of these Arctic people upon which much of today's knowledge was founded. Bown's descriptions of the many dogsled trips Rasmussen took leave no doubt in the reader's mind as to the arduousness of his adventures; the men on his teams faced starvation time and again.

The author also deftly ponders Rasmussen's personal life. Although the explorer had a wife and family in Denmark, he was willing to leave them for years at a time because of his passion for Arctic exploration. An assortment of maps and photographs help round out this informative and entertaining biography. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Much like Sam Phillips himself, author Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis) is nothing if not "obsessed" and "meticulous" when it comes to chronicling the lives of the founding giants of rock 'n' roll and R&B; he worked on the 750-page Sam Phillips since 1979, when he first met the genius behind Sun Records. The good news is that Guralnick uses those pages to present some of the best history of a musical era that provided the soundtrack for the Baby Boomer generation. Sun Studio was not the only place recording largely unheralded rhythm and blues musicians in the 1950s but, as Guralnick suggests, Phillips's Sun was the label that spearheaded the migration of that music into what became rock 'n' roll.

Methodically tracing Phillips's life, from his father's tenant farm near the Alabama-Tennessee border to "big city" Memphis, Guralnick focuses on Phillips's relentless drive to bring the sounds of the "poor blacks and poor whites that had been overlooked for so long" to the mainstream. The remarkable list of "walk-ins" that launched Sun reads like a who's who of rock 'n' roll: Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and the big dog of them all, Elvis Presley.

Sam Phillips's life was not all rock 'n' roll. Divorce, business failures, mental illness, lawsuits and disappointment came his way. At his funeral, "Sam looked good in his coffin... as more than a thousand people stood in line... [while] a succession of Sun hits played loudly over the funeral home's PA system." Not a bad way to go. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Assemble a group of novelists, poets, professors and journalists and ask them to write an essay on a book of the Bible that has special meaning for them and there's a good chance the result will be a book that will enlighten, provoke and at times infuriate readers. Whether believers or skeptics, the 32 contributors literary agent Andrew Blauner has recruited to that task do an admirable job sharing their strikingly diverse perspectives in The Good Book.

Touching on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, these essays overlap little in substance or style. The strongest pieces are rooted less in religious doctrine than they are in the life experiences of their authors. Lois Lowry, for one, evokes the Book of Ruth in telling the story of the marriage of her son, a United States fighter pilot serving in Germany, to a native of that country. Similarly engaging is Samuel Freedman's story, tied to the enigmatic account of the prophet Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, of how he "learned how to be a Jew at a black church."

As The Good Book's contributors demonstrate, whether it's viewed as a source of spiritual guidance, a work of literature or history or simply as an anchor for memory, in the hands of writers as talented as the group Andrew Blauner has gathered here, the Bible's riches are both inexhaustible and infinitely challenging. That's enough to make one hope that a sequel to this stimulating book, featuring a different chorus of voices, might be in the works. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

British author and illustrator Jane Ray (The Little Mermaid and Other Fishy Tales) turns her attention to the beasts of the earth in this exciting addition to her Story Collector series, sure to enchant middle graders and folklore enthusiasts alike.

Eleven animal poems and tales, whose origins range from the American South to Asia to the Arctic, are the works of other writers or retold by Ray in her own accessible, elegant style, perfect for reading aloud. The type is generously sized, and the design is agreeably roomy. The wonderful stories are enhanced by Ray's signature, etched Scraperboard illustrations, echoing folk art styles. A bejeweled scarlet elephant plucks a plump fig under a starry sky in the Indian tale "The Heavenly Elephant," and a graceful young couple strides through petal-studded air in the Slavic "The Singing Ringing Tree." A slavering minotaur's baleful red eye glows from the darkness in "Theseus and the Minotaur." An adorable, smoke-snorting Custard the Dragon accompanies the Ogden Nash poem in which he stars, and the collection's titular heroes snarl at each other across facing pages, atop a watermark showing their battle.

Ray chose her entries to illuminate humanity's "paradoxical and confused relationship with animals" and the many qualities we project onto them, from magical powers to human emotion. Classrooms and libraries will welcome this admirable assemblage with open arms, but it would also make a handsome gift for the starry-eyed child, animal lover or tale collector. Ray continues to conjure nothing short of pure magic. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services librarian, Latah County Library District (Idaho)