A story-world is an imaginative space in which authors live while composing, and where characters live forever. We enter it through the opening sentence, and if the story works, we dwell there until the last word. As a scholar and teacher, I spent many years trying to describe, track, and interpret what it means to move through a tale from entry to exit. As a reader and writer, I have been a life-long aficionado of that experience. Certain story-worlds continue to draw us into them over the centuries. Values and tastes change, and yet we return to these tales. They are the classics of the genre, and . . . but wait. “Whose values?” we ask. “Whose tastes?” “Whose classics?”

These questions are at the heart of much literary discussion today. In the effort to redress old biases, we generate new ones. I am for expanding, not contracting, the range of our appreciations. To add a Navajo legend, it is not necessary to subtract a Greek myth. To love Baldwin, we needn’t unlove Hawthorne. A classic tale is not an ideological battleground. It is a story-world that has been entered and reentered with profit and delight for many generations.

It is in that spirit of inclusion and renewal that this book came about. I began reentering some of my favorite story-worlds, exploring them like a time traveler. They dated mostly from the nineteenth century, though their authors were as different as Poe and Chesnutt or Jewett. In some cases, there was a minor character whose perspective seemed worth considering today. In other cases, there were time gaps in the original that teased the storyteller in me. There were instances where a prequel or a sequel might throw new light on a given narrative. And so, I began writing in response to these beloved texts.

My stories took place in the same story-worlds, but they were not modernizations, nor were they parodies, though my ear was attuned to the sound of the old voices. You might say I was reinvesting cultural capital, as Geraldine Brooks did in her 2005 novel March, which tells the story of the father who is absent from Little Women. If I had to describe my aim, I would say that, in revisiting these iconic stories, I was trying to open up themes and deploy lines of sight that broaden the text’s relevance or engage us in new ways in the twenty-first century. For example, it was to be expected that, in many of the tales, the female characters who had been glossed over in the original would now emerge with greater agency. Nor could I return to these stories without the benefit of hindsight, catching hints of the larger issues in the times and lives of the original authors.

Readers familiar with the works that inspired mine will, I hope, be interested in the relationship between the old and new texts, but it is not necessary to know the source material. I’ve included summaries of the older stories, but the narratives in this collection can, and must, be self-sufficient. In the end, of course, the original tales were simply catalysts. Whatever else the new stories may be, they are products of my imagination.