'A Wild Swan and Other Tales'

There’s not a whole lot of room in the classic fairy tale for moral ambiguity. Be good and good things will come to you. Happily ever after, right? Well, no. That’s not really the way life works. So why then do we treat fairy tales as moral allegory? Enter Michael Cunningham’s new collection of reworked fairy tales. The author of novels like 'The Hours' and 'By Nightfall' has taken stories like 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Rumplestiltskin' and 'Hansel and Gretel' and injected them with a bit of hard reality.