One morning 12-year-old Gregory Gourde wakes up in his bed with an impossible new feature: his head has become a watermelon. We follow Gregory down a rabbit hole of sorts to a new world and an audacious exploration of what it really means to be different in this dark yet humorous nod to Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland."

An ambitious homage to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Brubury Tales (Illustrated Edition) takes Chaucer's story and frame to Los Angeles just after the riots in 1992, where seven security guards on the graveyard shift swap tales in an impromptu storytelling competition for Christmas vacation time. Written entirely in rhyming verse, the tales themselves are poetic updates of classic stories by Dostoevsky, Dickens, Boccaccio, O Henry, Poe, Twain, Gilman, Crane, Saki, Anderson, Bierce, and even Khayyam's Rubaiyat. Along with 11 original illustrations by Keith Draws, the book also contains a...