xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

Bernheimer (My Mother Killed Me, my Father Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales) reignites the world of myth in her ingenious new anthology of boundless imagination. This collection is a farewell to the old way of myth-making and a courageously wild declaration of a new beginning for the world's oldest form of storytelling. 50 contemporary writers, including an illustrator and a comic book artist, reimagine and resurrect a diverse range of mythical figures from around the world. In Benjamin Percy's "The Dummy," a high-school wrestler, taunted for being a tomboy, forms a significant attachment to one of the practice mannequins. Gina Ochsner's "Sleeping Beauty" retells the Grimm Brothers' "Little Briar Rose" from a less privileged perspective; Joy Williams gives voice to the previously marginal Argos; and Michael Jeffrey Lee and David Schneiderman use Odysseus as a jumping-off point for fresh stories. These enthralling contemporary myths are bold stories of love, loss, friendship, disaster and everything in between. (Oct.)