More to the Story: Famous Novels Retold, Famous Characters Reimagined

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
~Umberto Eco

In addition to rewriting the story from a different character's perspective, sometimes authors like to rewrite the story in a different time period or place. Perrault's fairy tales transplanted to India? Plot devices from E. M. Forster adapted into a story of New England academia? Nathaniel Hawthorne set in the dystopian future? Here's a list of some titles in the library catalog that not only revisit some classic stories, but reimagines them in a completely different time and/or locale.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi [Snow White]

On Beauty by Zadie Smith [Howards End]

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey [Jane Eyre]

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin [Alice in Wonderland]

Havisham by Ronald Frame [Great Expectations]

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan [The Scarlet Letter]

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey [fairy tales]

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly [fairy tales]

Fables, Volume 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham et al. [fairy tales]

Betwixt and Between by Jessica Stilling [Peter Pan]

The Innocents by Francesca Segal [The Age of Innocence]

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley [King Lear]

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones [Great Expectations]

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick [The Ambassadors]

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski [Hamlet]

Last Orders by Graham Swift [As  I Lay Dying]

Delphine by Richard Sala [Snow White] 

William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher ; inspired by the work of George Lucas and William Shakespeare

Once Upon a Time Machine edited by Andrew Carl [fairy tales]

Alice in Tumblr-land: And Other Fairy Tales for a New Generation by Tim Manley [fairy tales]

Young Adult

Toads and Diamonds by Heather Tomlinson [fairy tales]

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor [Alice in Wonderland]

Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness by Lili St. Crow [Snow White]

A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan [Sleeping Beauty]

Going Bovine by Libba Bray [Don Quixote]

Railsea by China Miéville [Moby Dick]

Film 

Blancanieves [Snow White]

Shakespeare Retold [various plays]

Coriolanus [Coriolanus]

Much Ado About Nothing [Much Ado About Nothing]

Grimm ["Brother and Sister", from The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales]



Links

The Austen Project

Canongate Myths Series

The Hogarth Shakespeare