Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer's latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer's girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of the short story collection "Horse, Flower, Bird" and the editor of "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales" and the journal "Fairy Tale Review."