A Wild Swan

September 7, 2015
The latest from Cunningham (The Snow Queen) offers elegant, sardonic retellings of 10 iconic fairy tales, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Rapunzel.” Using present-day details and distinctly adult observations to imagine what happens before, after, and behind the familiar narratives, Cunningham explores the often disastrous transformations wrought by love and need. Having expected “ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form,” the title character in “Crazy Old Lady” is undone by loneliness long before a tattooed pair of siblings (“those young psychopaths, those beaten children”) arrive on her candy doorstep. An unnamed but recognizable Snow White conducts a bedtime negotiation with a partner still erotically fixated on her past; in “Little Man,” a gnome spins straw into gold to win the child he desperately longs for, something “readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.” Though grounded in the inevitable disenchantment of human life—“Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings,” the introduction notes wryly—Cunningham’s tales enlarge rather than reduce the haunting mystery of their originals. Striking black-and-white images from illustrator Shimizu add a fitting visual counterpoint to a collection at once dark and delightful.

September 1, 2015
An assortment of fairy tales revised and thrust into the present day. Cunningham (The Hours, 1998; By Nightfall, 2010, etc.) lightly touched on folklore for allegorical purposes in his 2014 novel, The Snow Queen, but here he approaches the genre head-on: these stories are each inspired by a particular tale, usually updated to add a dose of grown-up realism to its relationships. "Poisoned," for instance, turns "Snow White" into a piece of flash fiction about pillow-talk role-playing, while "Steadfast; Tin" is a rewrite of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" that opens at a frat party. Cunningham clearly admires these stories for their flexibility, the way they can, with a twist or two, make room for mature observations about love and sex: his take on "Hansel and Gretel," "Crazy Old Lady," reimagines the witch as a much-married woman exiled for her sexual appetites, "a goddess...of carnal knowingness." And in "Beasts," he considers whether it isn't so much the inner prince but outer animal that Beauty admires: "She wondered to herself why so many men seemed to think meekness was what won women's hearts." To that end, Cunningham embraces dark and sometimes-bloody characteristics of these stories as rendered most famously in the Grimm Brothers, but he also writes more open-heartedly about them, as in "A Monkey's Paw," which extends the original story (which ends with a couple wishing their zombified resurrected son to disappear) to a somber but compassionate conclusion. These rewrites are all elegantly told and nicely supplemented by illustrations by Shimizu, who gives each story a one-panel image that evokes Aubrey Beardsley in its detail and surrealistic splendor. But between the stories' brevity and borrowed plots, this collection also feels like a busman's holiday for Cunningham, who thrives in more expansive settings. A likable and occasionally provocative set of variations on kid-lit themes.

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Starred review from October 15, 2015
Fairy tales exert a gravitational force on many fiction writers, and some are moved to try their hand at updating them. The results can be wickedly delectable, as in Jean Thompson's The Witch and Other Tales Retold (2014) and, now, this boldly interpreted and transporting offering by Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner winner Cunningham (The Snow Queen, 2014). His touch is sure, light, and eviscerating as he neatly infuses these indelible old stories of kings and queens, princes and princesses, spells, greed, and loss with contemporary language ( off the grid ), settings (bars, a convenience store), and frank inquiries into the complexities of sexuality. Cunningham presents a graceful, haunting play on The Twelve Dancing Princesses; a sly twist on Hansel and Gretel, and a commanding variation on Jack and the Beanstalk in which he parses marriage and the bond between a loyal mother and a rapacious son. It's startling just how psychologically sophisticated and affecting Cunningham's pitch-perfect recastings of Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast are as stories of the perversity of desire. The original tales are timeless for good reasons, and by approaching them from a fresh and astute perspective with humor and compassion, Cunningham revitalizes their profound resonance. Imaginatively illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, this is a dazzling twenty-first-century fairy-tale collection of creative verve and keen enchantment. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cunningham's high stature and the book's irresistible premise will attract lively media attention and reader curiosity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2015

It's easy to imagine why an accomplished writer would turn to fairy tales for material: they offer strange, even peculiar plotlines yet are completely familiar to most of us. In this brief collection, with illustrations by Japanese illustrator Shimizu, based in New York, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cunningham modernizes a selection of tales, slanting the language toward modern life. For example, in the title story, the swan prince's brothers "married, had children, joined organizations." "The Monkey's Paw" stays faithful to the fairy-tale genre (ageless, supernatural) but is hopelessly dark. In others, the usual perspective is twisted around: "Jacked," the "Jack and the Beanstalk" tale, focuses on the misfortunes of the giant and his wife rather than on Jack's luck. "Beast" is no saccharine cartoon "Beauty and the Beast," but a succinct exploration of a marriage based on pity. Perhaps the best of the lot, "Steadfast: Tin," touches on the story of the steadfast tin soldier but doesn't inhabit it. VERDICT Cunningham's sardonic prose can condense the story of a marriage, for instance, into a few powerful pages, reflecting on loss, commitment, separation, and the changing nature of love over time. A treat for adult readers. [See Prepub Alert, 5/17/15.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2015

Beauty's hairy Beast buys smokes at a convenience store, jobless Jack skulks around his mother's basement until he trades a cow for some magic beans, and a girl's long, lush hair causes a catastrophe. It's hardly surprising to see Pulitzer Prize-winning Cunningham unfold new truths from enduring narratives; here, he uses fairy tales as source material. With artwork by New York-based Japanese illustrator Shimizu.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 25, 2016
Taylor and Hough dramatize these newfangled tales with youthful charm and subtle savagery, easily swinging from the author’s gentle humor into darker recesses. Cunningham meshes ancient tales with modern interpretations, offering psychological background for each of our bedtime familiars. He creates post fairy-tale scenarios and seeks answers to questions never asked: Why is Rumpelstiltskin so obsessed with the queen’s baby? What happens to Rumpelstiltskin after she names him? What is life like for the 11 swans revived as men? How does the 12th, the one-armed, one-winged ex-swan, handle his disability? Why is the wicked witch relieved to be shoved in the oven? Cunningham has created a new and wonderful way of bending our minds around the myths that loomed large in our childhoods, and Taylor and Hough do him justice. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.