A Wild Swan and Other Tales
by Michael Cunningham (author) and Yuko Shimizu (illustrator)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2015, 144 pages, 6.4 x 8.5 x 0.7 inches

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A few pages into A Wild Swan and Other Tales we’re stopped short by a narrator who is either supremely cynical or just brutally honest: “End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.” But that abrupt point of stoppage, it turns out, is the vulnerable moment onto which Michael Cunningham can graft fresh possibilities. In this case, he builds on Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Wild Swans” by imagining a trajectory for the least fortunate swan-brother, the one whose incomplete coat of nettles transformed him back into a man but left him with a “linty, dispiriting” wing where his arm should be.

In this collection of eleven stories, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Hours plucks and tweaks at familiar fairy tales in a variety of ways – through POV changes, time shifts, reimagined elements, and most especially an irresistible voice that’s by turns sardonic, salacious, or brimming with empathy. “Little Man” gives us the motivations behind Rumpelstiltskin’s baby mania. “Jacked” believably paints the beanstalk climber as dumb and lucky. “The Monkey’s Paw” locates another haunting angle on W.W. Jacobs’ tale about the cruel side of wishes.

Based only on its literary merits, A Wild Swan would already be worth your time – but this book is special. Masterful pen-and-ink illustrations, drop caps, endpapers, and cover art by award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu elevate A Wild Swan to exquisite object. Where your stereotypical fairy tale collection might boast lush colors, ornate bindings, and metallic accents, A Wild Swan is elegant. Restrained, but not spare, its quality emerges in sedulous attention to detail. White space explodes into knots of intricate line on carefully composed pages. A swan’s silhouette stands out in relief on the embossed cover. Cunningham’s canny, contemporary voice is made more timeless with decorations that hearken back to, but don’t simply imitate, famed illustrators from Walter Crane to Harry Clarke.

I’ve loved Shimizu’s work since a friend pointed me to her public page on Facebook a year ago. (Come for the behind-the-scenes illustration techniques, stay for the adorable Chihuahua pics.) A Wild Swan and Other Tales gives the Japanese-born artist the chance to shine in tandem with a talented major author secure in his powers. – Lisa Barrow

THE CREATIVE COTTAGE – SMALL SPACES REHABILITATED BY ADVENTUROUS HOMEOWNERS WITH VISION

The Creative Cottage
by Steve Gross and Susan Daley
Gibbs Smith
2016, 160 pages, 8.5 x 11 x 0.8 inches

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The Creative Cottage features 13 fabulous small abodes that house collections of many types. Each chapter highlights a cottage that has been rehabilitated by adventurous and artistic homeowners with vision. The cottages are art themselves, with thoughtful architecture, and they are filled with wonderful upcycled, found, and renovated components, both antique and modern blended together, feeling curated and purposeful as opposed to random and slap-dash. The creative souls behind them are artists, pickers, and normal folks too, who just needed someplace more special to live.

The text reads like a menu in a fancy restaurant, in which every ingredient has a special designation, treatment, and provenance. The painting from the lobby of an old theater in upstate New York. A salvaged stained-glass window. A zinc rain barrel holding antique canes. A soapstone sink from a high school lab. A red vinyl 1940s barbershop chair. Striped tea towels hung on a twig. A 1930s school locker sponge, painted to look like wood. A bed platform made from painted license plates and metal Alabama road signs. Sculptures fashioned from beaver-chewed wood.

Even if you’re not planning on renovating the shotgun shack on the back forty or the tiny abandoned building by the edge of the local harbor, the photographs are fun to look at. Finding each ingredient discussed within the accompanying photographs is like playing Where’s Waldo with 19th-century furniture and Barbershop ads from Nigeria. This might be a book for you if you enjoy seeing how others live, are interested in architecture and interior design, or need some inspiration to create something beautiful in whatever space surrounds you. – Aaron Downey

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