Silver Birch, Blood Moon
Forget aboutAndrew  Lang--Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling argue that fairy tales are  not the pastel fantasies of Victorian children's books but rather are  drawn with primary passions: love, hate, greed, sacrifice, joy, and  sorrow.Silver Birch, Blood Moonis their fifth anthology of  original stories with fairy tale sources, "reimagined" for adults.Nancy Kress retells "The Emperor's New Clothes" with a delightful  twist in "Clad in Gossamer"; Harvey Jacobs unleashes laughter with  "The Vanishing Virgin," starring an untalented magician, his lovely  but frozen assistant, and "a balding, sullen rabbit" called Pooper;  Michael Cadnum and Nalo Hopkinson present equally pointed but  distinctly different takes on the story of two sisters spelled to  speak according to their natures in "Toad Rich" and "Precious"; Wendy  Wheeler reworks "Beauty and the Beast" using Caribbean colors in "Skin  So Green and Fine"; and Richard William Asplund blends the Arabian  genie with the wonder-working rabbi of Hasidic legends to create "The  Dybbuk in the Bottle."The stories here are less gruesome than in  the previous collections, and both sexes claim heroic as well as  villainous characters. So enter imagination's marketplace, and watch  the storytellers at work. It's amazing what they can do with a bit of  old legend.--Nona Vero