Philip Pullman — best know for his Dark Materials series — has written a new edition of the Brothers Grimm stories, called Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version. It’s the 200th anniversary of the Grimm collection, and Pullman’s edition includes author’s notes and Aarne–Thompson classifications. Pullman has revisited the stories with a light touch, not attempting to modernize them, but rather pulling from lots of different sources and versions to assemble coherent tales that have all of the teeth and blood of the original pieces. Pullman’s Grimms are stories stripped to the bone, where every sentence just moves the thing forward, where almost no characters have names, motivations are explicit and stated, and stuff happens fast. It was a fantastic read.