Fairy tales retold—with a twist—from “some of our best storytellers” including Neil Gaiman, Gahan Wilson, Tanith Lee, and others (The Washington Post). In this “no holds barred . . . nightmarish . . . provocative” collection, bestselling and award-winning fantasy masters put a dark, disturbing, and erotic spin on your favorite bedtime stories—and give you something entirely new to trouble your dreams (The New York Times Book Review). A boy is haunted through adulthood by a soul-eating creature that lies forever in wait under Neil Gaiman’s “Troll Bridge”; a melancholy amphibian shares his most private fantasies with a therapist in Gahan Wilson’s “The Frog Prince”; in Tanith Lee’s “Snow-Drop,” a lonely artist invites seven circus performers into her home to satisfy an obsession; in Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Little Poucet,” a band of lost brothers find refuge and terror with a hungry family in the woods; and Wendy Wheeler delves into the deviant psyche of the predatory male in “Little Red.” Also featuring Nancy Kress, Charles de Lint, Melanie Tem, Patricia A. McKillip, Jack Dann, and others, all paying a revisit to our favorite fairy tales in ways you’ve never dared to imagine.

Kinship Cove protects their own and is a popular spot for fairy tale heroes, heroines, and even a villain or two. Welcome to the Kinship Cove library where the sassy library clerk is about to have all her secrets exposed during story hour. * * * Siamese cat shifters are known to be chatty but I don’t always live up to that stereotype, mostly because talking means telling secrets. That’s not what I should be doing. I may have run away from my own version of the evil queen to hide among the shifters of Kinship Cove, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe quiet yet. Mirror Mirror, on the wall…how can I hide from my past when my fated mate is going to hunt to uncover it all?

In The Red Snow, his second work, Greiner turns his keen eye to Alaska's vast wilderness and its most mysterious creature: the gray wolf. Basing his story on careful research and personal observation, Greiner recounts the lives of the Tanana River Valley wolf pack and the tough, lonely hunter, Jake, who inhabits their valley. In splendid detail, he describes the birth of pups, the victory of the hunt, and the habits of animals who share the wolves' valley. Yet in describing the beauty, he never forgets the harshness of the Arctic wilderness; Greiner makes the ugly realities of the fight for survival intensely clear.

There never was a story that was happy through and through. When writer Arthur Ransome leaves his unhappy marriage in England and moves to Russia to work as a journalist, he has little idea of the violent revolution about to erupt. Unwittingly, he finds himself at its center, tapped by the British to report back on the Bolsheviks even as he becomes dangerously, romantically entangled with Trotsky's personal secretary. Both sides seek to use Arthur to gather and relay information for their own purposes . . . and both grow to suspect him of being a double agent. Arthur wants only to elope far from conflict with his beloved, but her Russian ties make leaving the country nearly impossible. And the more Arthur resists becoming a pawn, the more entrenched in the game he seems to become. Blood Red Snow White, a Soviet-era thriller from renowned author Marcus Sedgwick, is sure to keep readers on the edge of their seats. This title has Common Core connections.

Edgar Snow (1905--1972) was one of the most notable Western journalists to report on China in both the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. He first became famous in the mid-1930s when he broke through a Nationalist blockade and reached the Communists in northwest China. For nearly a decade, no foreign reporter had seen the Communists, who were widely regarded as a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous book Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading it. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement. In this award-winning biography, journalist John Maxwell Hamilton follows Snow from his birth in Kansas City to his rise as a celebrated foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, his ostracism during the cold war, and his role as a singular journalistic bridge between Communist China and the United States. With a new preface by the author, this revealing portrait of the widely misunderstood Snow firmly establishes him as a model for the kind of committed reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.

Günter Koschorrek wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, storing them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was not until he was reunited with his daughter in America some forty years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow. The author’s excitement at the first encounter with the enemy in the Russian Steppe is obvious. Later, the horror and confusion of fighting in the streets of Stalingrad are brought to life by his descriptions of the others in his unit – their differing manners and techniques for dealing with the squalor and death. He is also posted to Romania and Italy, assignments he remembers fondly compared to his time on the Eastern Front. This book stands as a memorial to the huge numbers on both sides who did not survive and is, some six decades later, the fulfilment of a responsibility the author feels to honour the memory of those who perished.

Red Winter White Snow is a fictional account of an attempt to destroy the United States by hard-line KGB officials in the Russia who have not accepted the outcome of events that led to the dissolving of the USSR following the war in Afghanistan and the end of the cold war. Glasnost and Peristroika were unacceptable to them, and one in particular was driven to this plan when he suffered losses in his family caused by the illegal drug trade that began flourishing during the Afghan war. When Yuri Chezenckos son was killed in Afghanistan while he was investigating the drug problem, and his relationship to Yuri, the deputy director of the KGB was discovered, a cover-up was initiated which resulted in the reassignment of Alexi Yanoff, the KGB Lieutenant Colonel who had been in charge of the investigation and later we learn, involved the drug trade as well. Yanoff was sent to Cuba in a lower position, which he resented. Adding to the plot is Rubio LaRosa, a wealthy South American banker who hungers for something more than money, the accumulation of power, and sees bringing the KGB and Cartels together as his ticket to becoming as powerful as the Cartels. The central character of the story is John McClure, a Navy SEAL, who loses the members of his team while he is away on a lone assignment to bring Yanoff out of Cuba after he has offered to trade information for asylum. McClures team is killed during one of the joint KGB/Cartel operations designed to defeat the rather strong and effective blockade being carried out by the United States which has been very effective in reducing the flow of drugs which had been creating conditions that were intolerable. The American President authorized the blockade, which employed U.S. military forces and equipment in large quantities. When the KGB/Cartel combination begins defeating the blockade, the CIA and the President use McClures efforts to find out what happened to his team to help solve the problem of why the blockade has begun to fail. Deep cover KGB agents, one working in the CIA itself, become involved and the CIA agent begins an adversarial relationship with McClure. Karl Gavrilov, or Carl Garvey as the CIA knows him, lets his ego drive him to confront McClure face to face to prove he can better him. As the events begin to cascade, Garvey loses his nerve and asks for asylum himself, and in a fateful twist, McClure is sent to retrieve him. In the end, McClure has learned that it was Garvey that facilitated the events that killed his team, and exacts his revenge. The KGB/Cartel link is broken but there is a lingering suggestion that the drug problem in the United States will not end.