We have seen a fair share of Snow White adaptations, some good, some not so good.  Valente's Six-Gun Snow White happens to be an excellent one. Set in the Old West, Snow White is the half-Crow daughter of Mr. H, a wealthy white silver magnate and Gun That Sings, a beautiful Crow woman who was forced into marriage. After her mother dies giving birth to her, Snow White is kept on Mr. H's large and luxurious estate with only a bear, coyote and fox to keep her company. After her father decides to take on a new wife, a mysterious and beautiful woman from New England, Snow White's life changes. Her Step-Mother is both loving and cruel, practicing a strange magic that causes Snow White to flee into wild Indian Territory on her horse, Charming.

While outrunning the bounty hunter sent by Mrs. H to bring back her heart, Snow White searches for her identity and some semblance of hope. This novella is simple in its prose, yet rich in the atmosphere that it creates. Six-Gun Snow White is a fresh and inventive take on the classic.

Fans of Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor (2009) will find the same simple, yet luminous and elegant, prose in this collection of short stories. However, the tone is decidedly different, as be inferred from the title.  The collection begins innocently enough, with a woman going into a bakery to buy a strawberry shortcake for her son’s birthday—but then it is revealed her son has been dead for twelve years, perhaps a murder victim?  Similar threads of darkness and obsession weave through the remaining tales, all of which are interconnected by the thinnest of margins. A character leaves something in a trash can in one story which is later seen by a character in another; the narrator of one story is mentioned by the narrator of another, and so on. 

This collection, despite its sometimes macabre content, is exquisitely crafted, delicately presented, and arresting in its imagery.  A small gem.

Pulitzer-winning novelist Russell (for Swamplandia, 2011) returns with her second collection of short stories, after St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006.  Her complex yet focused stories employ situations that are unusual or even outlandish to illuminate aspects of human lives and relationships. Such is the case in her title story, in which two aging vampires have taken up residence in a Tuscan lemon grove, finding the serenity of the place and the taste of the lemons the only thing that curbs their cravings. But it is obvious that their peace…and perhaps their marriage…are nearly over, as the narrator must come to terms with his own nature.   Other stand-outs include “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979,” a coming of age tale with a non-traditional twist, and “The New Veterans,” a small gem about a veteran of the Iraq War and the middle-aged masseuse drawn into his journey to recovery in a most unusual way.

Dark and strange, yet ultimately enlightening, Russell’s short stories are imaginative and utterly unique. Fans of Aimee Bender’s short stories will find much to enjoy here.

Johnson, a self-described skeptic, was raised by back-to-nature, hemp-and-granola hippie types.  He grew up not wearing diapers, eating according to whatever nutritional trend his mother was onto that week, and subjected to an array of natural cures. But it is the nature of children to rebel, and Johnson’s rebelling took the form of an acceptance of modern technology, food culture, and medicine. However, he couldn’t really shake his roots and set out to do the research, do the leg-work, investigate the growing resistance to a technological way of life, and figure out just what is better for humans in the long run: Science, or nature?  He doesn’t find many definitive answers in this always fascinating look into contemporary American culture. While modern medical care definitely means that the average pregnant woman is better off than her ancestors would have been, a growing reliance on Caesarian sections is leading to a new increase in maternal mortalities. Johnson finds similar seeming contradictions in all of the areas he investigates, laying out both his surface level findings and then digging beneath to expose possible reasons for the situation as it exists today.

Johnson owes an obvious debt, both in style and in content, to Michael Pollan, and indeed cites Pollan as not only an influence but a supporter of his work. Fans of Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma will find much of interest here.