Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern...

In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, we see a Beauty who turns into a Beast, Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother stoned as a werewolf, and Bluebeard as a murderous, porn-addicted businessman. In the surreally delightful novel Wise Children, an elderly woman recounts the colorful life she and her identical twin sister led as vaudeville performers. And the...