t's interesting using this book in a class. The Swan stories are the most popular, and the quiet ones about relationships confuse people for some reason.  I liked "Warm-Mouth" far more on this re-read.

Old Review
There is a misnomer on the cover of this book. Some short stories in this volume have not been commissioned for the book. Several of them have appeared in various magazines and collections (some have appeared over a decade ago).

This is okay, for this is the first time that they are all collected together and I hadn't read any of them before.

The purpose of this collection in part, according to Bernheimer, is to present fairy tales as an acceptable source of literature, at least to present modern fairy tales as such. The succeds very well at this and several stories are truly descendents of the French Salon writers, Andersen, and the Grimms. Some of the stories don't work (at least for me) but several stories are absolutely, jaw dropping friggin (Can I say that?) wonderful. Even the stories that I didn't like (like "Warm Mouth" by Joyelle McSweeny) were at least worthy experiments in differenty styles. Each story has a brief afterword by the author and the table of contents gives the source tale for each story.

The two best stories (and it is a very close race, a photo finish, for several stories for this title) are John Updike's "Bluebeard in Ireland", a story about a marriage; and Katherine Vaz's "What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body is Gone", also a story about a relationship. In fact, many of the stories in this collection, as in many fairy tales, focus on relationships. Updike and Vaz's short fiction are really descendents of such older as "Bluebeard" because like the older tales, they look at marriage and relationships in the modern world. The two stories are magical without having "magic" in them.

Many of the tales in the collection are not what most readers would call fantasy or horror (I brought this at Borders which had it in the horror section), but there is a good mixture of fantasy and magic realism. I heistate to use the word horror. In fact, the two most distrubing stories, "The Erlking" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and "With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold" by Neil LaBute, are distrubing because of thier out and out realism. "Dapplegrim" by Brain Evenson is the only true horror story, and considering the source, it shouldn't be surprising.

There is humor here as well. I didn't really enjoy Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, but his "Orange" is really, really funny.

Overall, the collection fulfills the promise that is made in the introduction

Ah, now I get the Heyer love. Picked this up because several of my GR and BL friends swear by Heyer. It was enjoyable. More of a domestic drama than a flat out mystery. It's like a forerunner of Ruth Rendell when she is/was writing as Barbara Vine.

Heyer looks at a family that is under the thumb of the worst Dickens character ever (think an evil Martin Chuzzlewit). Then the horse manure hits the fan. It's actually quite a good book with nice little touches.

I disliked half the poems in this collection, and loved the other half. It's a jumble to be honest. The idea for most of them is quite interesting, using historic points to set the poems in. It also covers a wide range of the globe in terms of horse culture.

So this is heavy on the holiday sugar, just keep that in mind before reading.  Apparently, this is a follow-up short story to the novel The Nothing Girl, which I haven't read.  I wasn't lost though Thomas was a bit of a nice surprise.

You can see this as a better end Hallmark movie.  But there is a wonderful sense of humor in here, I mean laugh out loud.  If you like All Creatures or Dr Martin or Ballykissangel, you should enjoy this.

Note- I purchased this for free.  It is still currently free.

Okay, so I haven't read the other parts, and it's nice that the end result of unprotected boinking is used here.  But talk about tropes overboard.