{"id":44980,"date":"2025-10-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=44980"},"modified":"2025-10-16T14:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T21:32:11","slug":"a-wild-swan-the-creative-cottage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/a-wild-swan-the-creative-cottage\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wild Swan \/ The Creative Cottage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A WILD SWAN PLUCKS AT FAMILIAR FAIRY TALES WITH A VOICE THAT\u2019S SARDONIC, SALACIOUS, OR BRIMMING WITH EMPATHY<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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A Wild Swan and Other Tales<\/em>
by Michael Cunningham (author) and Yuko Shimizu (illustrator)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2015, 144 pages, 6.4 x 8.5 x 0.7 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few pages into A Wild Swan and Other Tales<\/em> we\u2019re stopped short by a narrator who is either supremely cynical or just brutally honest: \u201cEnd of story. \u2018Happily ever after\u2019 fell on everyone like a guillotine\u2019s blade.\u201d 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\u2019s version of \u201cThe Wild Swans\u201d 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 \u201clinty, dispiriting\u201d wing where his arm should be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this collection of eleven stories, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Hours<\/em> plucks and tweaks at familiar fairy tales in a variety of ways \u2013 through POV changes, time shifts, reimagined elements, and most especially an irresistible voice that\u2019s by turns sardonic, salacious, or brimming with empathy. \u201cLittle Man\u201d gives us the motivations behind Rumpelstiltskin\u2019s baby mania. \u201cJacked\u201d believably paints the beanstalk climber as dumb and lucky. \u201cThe Monkey\u2019s Paw\u201d locates another haunting angle on W.W. Jacobs\u2019 tale about the cruel side of wishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based only on its literary merits, A Wild Swan<\/em> would already be worth your time \u2013 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<\/em> to exquisite object. Where your stereotypical fairy tale collection might boast lush colors, ornate bindings, and metallic accents, A Wild Swan<\/em> 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\u2019s silhouette stands out in relief on the embossed cover. Cunningham\u2019s canny, contemporary voice is made more timeless with decorations that hearken back to, but don\u2019t simply imitate, famed illustrators from Walter Crane to Harry Clarke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve loved Shimizu\u2019s 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<\/em> gives the Japanese-born artist the chance to shine in tandem with a talented major author secure in his powers. \u2013 Lisa Barrow<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE CREATIVE COTTAGE \u2013 SMALL SPACES REHABILITATED BY ADVENTUROUS HOMEOWNERS WITH VISION<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Creative Cottage<\/em>
by Steve Gross and Susan Daley
Gibbs Smith
2016, 160 pages, 8.5 x 11 x 0.8 inches<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Creative Cottage<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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. \u2013 Aaron Downey<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once a week we\u2019ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because\u00a0the possibilities they inspire are new.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Issue No. 89<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13684,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[31],"tags":[2398],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45002,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44980\/revisions\/45002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}