Fairy tales are, by their very nature, magical things. But something rather extraordinary happens to them after they’ve been re-imagined by Gregory Maguire: they get a loyal following. Best known as the author of the wildly popular Wicked (adapted into a Broadway musical) and its sequels, as well as books for both children (Leaping Beauty, What-the-Dickens) and adults (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Mirror Mirror), Maguire has lent his witty, sophisticated storytelling to some of the most beloved tales in our collective consciousness, often altering our long-held and deeply felt reactions to notorious characters and infamous plotlines. While never contradicting or poking fun at the original tale, he always adds a new dimension to our interpretations.

All of which makes Maguire’s work perfectly suited to adaptation for stage, screen and, most recently, radio. Each year, NPR asks a well-known writer to create a Christmas story for broadcast, and in 2008, Maguire was tapped. The result was Matchless, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Little Match Girl.” In the original work, translated from Danish in the mid-19th century, a poor young girl dies alone in the night, freezing to death in the bitter cold. At the time, her dying visions were widely interpreted as religious metaphors. In Matchless, Maguire gently shifts the focus to illuminate a seldom-considered character. Young Frederik, living through desperate times with his mother, is the nameless boy from Andersen’s tale who absconds with the match girl’s shoe just before her death. The shoe is quite a find for Frederik, who has very little in the way of material possessions. But his intention for the shoe is unexpected. He returns home with his prize and quickly retreats to the attic where he has been meticulously constructing a miniature island town, made from bits and pieces he’d collected at the docks.

“Andersen left me a little thread to pull,” Maguire says in a telephone interview. “Frederik is the only other child and he has a line: ‘Here’s a cradle for my babies.’ Therefore I felt invited to follow that. I began to realize who the boy was and what his particular hardships were. As sad as it is, it’s a beautiful story. There’s this little bit of domestic magic that re-illuminates the possibility of connection between the living and the dead.”

While “The Little Match Girl” was adored by generations past, it hasn’t reached as many 21st-century readers as Andersen’s other tales, which include “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling.” That’s one of the reasons Maguire selected it for the NPR project. “It struck me as being perfect,” he explains. “Though people of a certain age will remember the story, it has been gradually slipping away.” But writing a story—with very little lead time—intended to be read aloud before being published was a new experience for the author.

“When you’re doing a radio story, you have to let your characters have individual-sounding voices,” Maguire notes. “You have to roll the story out very quickly with just enough, but not too much, description so that the listeners can learn about the environment as well as the conditions. So it was very different for me. Sometimes I’ll have the story idea on my desk for five years before I feel like I have caught the particular cadence of how it should go.”

Published for the first time this fall in a beautifully designed gift edition, Matchless contains Maguire’s own finely detailed black-and-white drawings. These vignettes, each contained in a small circle as if viewed through a lens, show such scenes as a carriage on a cobblestone street and a cozy attic room accessed by a ladder.

Maguire’s story has the weight and solidity of a treasured folk tale, something to be handed down and retold. It’s for children at bedtime but also for their grandparents. That’s one of Maguire’s obvious strengths: the ability to write on several different levels to personally address the interests of his entire audience. He credits Andersen with a similar talent: “He had the capacity to start the story in the first sentence. He dispensed with many of the conventions of storytelling—the once-upon-a-times—and spoke colloquially.”

In Matchless, Maguire leaves open the possibility of an optimistic ending, as Frederik’s family joins together with the poor match girl’s. And with this retelling comes the possibility of renewed interest in the original story. But perhaps, too, the reading of Matchless will become a new holiday tradition for many families. “It’s something that all artists hope,” says the author, “that their work will live beyond the length of their days.”

Ellen Trachtenberg is the author of The Best Children’s Literature: A Parent’s Guide. She writes from Philadelphia.

The day that fans have been eagerly anticipating for more than 20 years arrives on January 8 with the publication of A Memory of Light, the final entry in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

Like the progress of time itself, this remarkable fantasy series has had a long and circuitous journey. Author James Oliver Rigney Jr. launched the series in 1990, writing under the pen name Robert Jordan, and continued it until his death in 2007.

After reading a heartfelt eulogy to Jordan by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, Jordan’s widow and editor, Harriet McDougal, chose Sanderson for the difficult task of wrapping up the epic series. Working from Jordan’s voluminous notes, outlines, character lists and scenes (including the ending), Sanderson has completed the final three books in the series: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light.

The final hefty volume, at more than 900 pages, will provide the answer that readers have clamored for: How will the Last Battle play out?

To provide a satisfying answer to that question, Sanderson was assisted by the members of “Team Jordan,” which includes Harriet McDougal, as well as longtime assistants/editors Maria Simons and Alan Romanczuk. We asked McDougal a few questions about this final chapter.

With Robert Jordan you did “curb-side editing” (editing a manuscript as it was written, chapter by chapter). How did your process work with Sanderson?
Harriet McDougal: With Brandon, Alan and Maria and I made broad-gauge suggestions and agreed with him on major trajectories, back in the spring of 2011. In early 2012, Brandon delivered a draft to us. We worked on this draft for weeks, sent revision suggestions back, doing this in bunches all spring long. In the summer of 2012 we worked long weeks on more revisions.

It was a different process. Remember, by the time of Jordan’s death we had worked together on about 20 books, Maria had been working with us for almost 12 years, and Alan for six.

It was more like working with Jordan on one of his early manuscripts. In the later books, he had already learned everything that would drive me nuts, so he didn’t do those things anymore.

What was the hardest part of seeing the series through to completion after your husband’s death?
The repeated reminder that he was no longer alive.

Can you share a favorite scene from A Memory of Light or from the series as a whole?
I have never forgotten Hopper’s death and joyful flight. Other than that, I love the whole series. And A Memory of Light as a whole.

How do you feel about the series coming to an end?
Sadness, joy and relief.

Caribbean author Karen Lord has taught physics, trained soldiers, worked in the Foreign Service and earned a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion. In her new novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, Lord manages to combine many of these experiences—along with her telling eye for detail—in the story of Grace Delarua, a mid-level scientist who has to work with a high-level refugee. Against the odds, the two begin to fall for each other. Although it begins with a tragedy, Lord’s inviting storytelling and range of voices make this novel a fascinating read, and we asked Lord, who lives in Barbados, a few questions about it.

What was the genesis of The Best of All Possible Worlds?
The precursors were the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami (more women and children than men were killed in certain fishing communities); gender imbalance in countries with prenatal screening and/or family size restrictions; and the effects of female-scarcity on societies. It didn’t become a story until one day I read a blog post about the Star Trek movie reboot, commenting that from what they’d seen of Vulcans offplanet, most of the survivors were likely male . . . and what would that mean for future societal dynamics?

From there I started some postcolonial musings. What happens when an empire is suddenly wiped out? How does a society transition from wealth and widespread influence to dependency and refugee status among those once considered inferior? I thought about the British and the Japanese empires during the 20th century. I imagined a benevolent and slightly aloof paternalism deeply shaken by unanticipated defeat.

I imagined a planet, Cygnus Beta, to provide a context to highlight those issues. Founded by refugees and adventurers from all over the galaxy, it is a place where groups have mixed and blended their genetic and cultural heritages while others have tried to hold onto a certain amount of tradition and homogeneity. The full gamut of preservation, adaptation and assimilation has been played out many times by different communities. I slipped in bits of history and myth when creating some of those communities. (In one case I was directly inspired by a modern-day news article about an actor who sliced his throat on stage when a prop knife was accidentally switched with a real knife!)

I took visual inspiration from countries I’ve visited, or wanted to visit: Guyana, Colombia, Trinidad, Montserrat, India, New Zealand, Australia (or at least the opera!), Malta, Wales, Jordan, Argentina and Iceland.

What happens when an empire is suddenly wiped out?

The Best of All Possible Worlds begins with an ungraspable tragedy and moves on leaving us in the same state as the novel's characters: with the ground swept away from beneath our feet. What drew you to this beginning?
With a tragedy of that magnitude your centre is shaken, your sense of up and down is destroyed and somehow, amidst the hugeness of the tumult, mundane life goes on, expecting you to have a drink of water, or a cup of tea, or get out of bed and get dressed. It’s almost laughable, but life doesn’t stop for tragedy even when you want it to. Grief is experienced as vertigo. How do people find their ground again?

Grace Delarua, who tells the story of The Best of All Possible Worlds, is at once highly observant and, although there are other reasons for it, a little obtuse. Why can't she see what others see? Was she based on anyone you know?
I have always found people to be variably observant. There are some things they are very good at noticing and other things that pass them by completely. There are, as you say, reasons for that, including fear and denial, lazy expectations based on deeply ingrained stereotypes and lack of key information. The worst offenders are those who are convinced that they are observant, certain that they are unbiased and completely unaware that they don’t have all the facts.

Delarua’s not directly based on anyone I know, but I was inspired by something someone told me years ago. She had to briefly work with a frivolous, chatty and completely irritating woman. Then, near the end of her stint, she got to know the woman better and discovered that she was extremely intelligent, hardworking and ambitious. In fact, they had a lot in common and she thought they could have been great friends if she hadn’t been stuck for so long with her bad first impression.

Was there anything about this book that surprised you as you wrote about it?
The romance surprised me. There wasn’t supposed to be any! I was also surprised at the explanation for psionic abilities [like telekinesis or telepathy]. It was strangely fascinating and I was tempted to write pseudo-academic papers on the topic. The Elves . . . yes, the Elves surprised me by being astonishingly plausible when by rights they should have been pure farce.

The biggest shock was inventing the savannah dog, then doing research on the name only to discover that there actually is a savannah dog . . . which looked like I imagined it and is located in the real-life region on which I based the Cygnian region.

How has your life changed since your first novel was published?
I co-write research reports for socioeconomic projects but I haven’t written an academic paper in a good while. I’m certainly not famous yet. The local newspapers are learning not to misspell my last name (there are more Lordes than Lords in Barbados). This year I’m going to the Adelaide Writers’ Week, which will be my first time in Australia, and I’m really looking forward to it!

I know you read far and wide. Have you read anything recently you'd especially recommend?
I love to recommend Caribbean science fiction, [like] Ghosts by Curdella Forbes (2012) and The Rainmaker’s Mistake by Erna Brodber (2007). I’ve gained a new appreciation for short story collections. I recently read Ted Chiang’s brilliant Stories of Your Life and Others (I know, I’m late). Karin Tidbeck’s recent debut collection Jagannath is beautiful, and The Weird anthology, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, is essential reading.

Gavin Grant is the publisher of Small Beer Press, which published Karen Lord’s debut novel, Redemption in Indigo. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Best of All Possible Worlds.

British author Nick Harkaway is known for his ability to fearlessly blend genres in novels like The Gone-Away World. In his third novel, Tigerman, he mixes parenting, superheroes and geopolitics in the story of Lester Ferris, a British Army sergeant sent to a remote island outpost on what is supposed to be a simple assignment. But Lester refuses to ignore the shady goings-on in Mancreau, and his growing relationship with a native street kid complicates things further. We asked Harkaway a few questions about superheroes and being a dad.

Tigerman is not a typical superhero story, but it does feature some of the classic superhero tropes, as well as a boy who’s obsessed with comic books. Have comic books always been part of your reading life?
Not always—I came to them comparatively late. I vaguely remember reading some 2000AD before then, but I never really followed comics until I saw Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen around the time I was 18. But I don't think I was really into comics until my 20s, when a couple of my friends started feeding me the weird and alarming stuff Grant Morrison was doing, and then someone gave me some Warren Ellis . . . it all flows from there. I love shiny, fun things, but what I really love is shiny fun things that also turn out to be brilliantly clever and intelligent. That's the brass ring. (I must look that up. I don't know what it means.) (I just have. That's really interesting.)

"Superheroes are for the most part inherently conservative. All they want to do is fix the status quo, which when you think about it is shocking." 

You’ve described the island of Mancreu as a kind of modern Casablanca, a place where secrets and dark deeds can be conveniently dumped. Why do you think a place like Mancreu worked better for you than, say, a crime-ridden metropolis like Batman’s Gotham City?
Well, first up: the superhero notion isn't the only or even necessarily the primary one I'm working with in the book. This is a thriller with themes of parenthood, and it so happens that one of the things the main character does is put on a supersuit. But he can't fly or whatever, he's just a guy trying to do the right thing in a situation that's completely insane. Gotham City, in the Batman story, is a freakishly dangerous place full of lunatics. Lester's solution in Gotham would not be Batman's, because he would see immediately that whatever is wrong with it is completely unfixable. Batman is in this losing battle to make it less hellish, but it is never, ever going to be Metropolis no matter how much money Bruce Wayne pours into it. 

Mancreu isn't like that. There's nothing inherently dysfunctional about it. In fact if it hadn't been abused and broken by people who didn't care about it, it would basically be a really nice place. So Lester is not in a war, which is important because he understands war. He's trying to win the peace—and that, as we're all painfully aware right now, is much harder.

I couldn’t help but notice that the first comic book mentioned by name in Tigerman is Warren Ellis’ Planetary, a book that filters a lot of complex cultural ideas through a superhero aesthetic. Tigerman does a similar kind of filtering, in a way. Did you draw on any particular comic book inspirations, while writing this book?
I love Planetary. I just think it's brilliant. I also love the original Authority run, which is part of where I got the idea that superheroes are for the most part inherently conservative. All they want to do is fix the status quo, which when you think about it is shocking. The Justice League can beat cosmic bad guys, figure out how Sporflompty Zigguratifiers can save the planet from death rays, but they can't fix corporate malfeasance because, what, it's beneath them? (I mean, the real reason is that superheroes basically came of age when we were in a war mentality, they fight enemies you can punch. But increasingly we realize that punching people doesn't really solve anything. They wake up angry, as you would.)

Aaaanyway. I tend to believe that all pop culture either plays with or exemplifies whatever is going on in society. If it's completely unselfconscious, you see reflections of whatever people are scared of as the villain—others of some sort, but what sort? Invasion of the Bodysnatchers comes out of the1950s. In the 1980s you had these huge world-ending threats. After 9/11 you get all these stories about infiltration and destruction. So you don't have to filter: the whole system of pop is a filter, a distillate. The stuff that is conscious, like Ellis's work, is like an elixir, and it's amazing. The stuff that is—to my taste, anyway—basically not very good, is still interesting.

But I didn't really lean on anything in particular while I was writing this. I'm a magpie, which I think is what most authors are. Part of the original inspiration was Chabon's book, The Final Solution, which was itself a Sherlock Holmes riff. But then obviously there was a big Batman thing happening, and a lot of people have picked up on Graham Greene, which I didn't really think of but now I think "oh, right, of course.” And Casablanca. And . . . it just goes on and on.

"I tend to believe that all pop culture either plays with or exemplifies whatever is going on in society."

I read that the idea for Tigerman hit you in 2010, but other writing projects and becoming a father meant that you didn’t finish the book until three years later. How did it evolve from that initial concept?
Oh, it changed but it stayed the same. The big change was that I took out this totally stupid twist I had in it. Everyone hated it, and I was like: "But the twist completely changes everything!" And then I realized that, hey: yes, it did, and I didn't want any of those things to change. Those were the things I needed to have stay the same and everything else could change. I've actually just had the same thing with the book I'm writing now. I was completely screwed, I couldn't make it work, and suddenly it's like: oh, if I turn the whole thing on its head but leave the important stuff right way up, now everything feels as if I meant it that way." It's writing. It's just how you live.

You’ve said that the book is, despite all the other ideas being explored in it, at its heart a story about fatherhood, and you were coming into your own role as a father while writing it. How much did your own attitudes about being a parent transfer over to Lester?
Everything. Everything everything. Lester is driven by love. That's his heart. He wants to love and be loved and he's somehow missed out, and here, in this totally messed up place, he's got the shot and he doesn't know how to take it.

I was much luckier than he is. I had it all in front of me and it was—is—great. But I know exactly how that sense of bewilderment feels, because there was a moment in my life where I just had no idea how I was going to get from there to here. And then suddenly there was this amazing woman who is now my wife, and everything was obvious again. But parenthood: there is no one who knows what that will be until they do it, in whatever way. If you adopt, if you foster, whatever, you are a parent. I'm not being all essentialisty exclusivy here. I'm just saying it is a thing that, until you take it on, you don't know what kind of lunatic it will make you. Because it will make you some kind of lunatic or you are not doing it right. It could completely make you into a person who dresses up and fights crime because your kids need you to do that. Of course it could. Have you seen the insane things people do for their kids? That Liam Neeson movie? Taken? That's a documentary about the emotions of parenthood. It's like: there is a threat?! IT MUST BE DESTROYED. WITH FLAMES. 

The boy is a fascinating character, in part because he’s an intriguing combination of very openly exuberant and a little mysterious. How, if at all, did your own children influence the character?
Not at all! Because they're not there yet. The boy, like the sergeant and all the others, he's mostly me through a filter. It's the tie between them that I borrowed from my sense of being a dad.

If circumstance forced you to become a superhero vigilante, who do you think you’d become? Would you pick a pre-established character or dream up your own persona?
I'd have to make something up. I cannot think of anything worse than being a writer occupying someone else's character in real life because you didn't have the confidence to make up your own crazy identity. But actually I'd be different from most of the characters you see. I'd be the guy who shows up and does something really unrelated at the very beginning, like drop a piece of paper on the bar, and when the whole thing is in full-bore showdown with everyone ready to fight, someone's going to pick up that piece of paper and written on it is the exact right thing to change what's going on for the better.

Which I realize is impossible, but it's what I've got right now. I don't want to think about what I'd become in real life, because that involves thinking about whatever appalling trauma would put me there.

It’s been 76 years since Superman first appeared, and everyone’s got their own theory about why superheroes continue to endure. What’s yours, and did it change at all during the writing of Tigerman?
I think I got to say it all in the book. Superman is faith and hope. He derives from the same American pop culture pot as the cowboy, the virtuous one. He comes, he saves you, he goes. He doesn't become the government. He doesn't make rules. He just operates on a personal basis. Capra's movies have a lot about this—that's one half of the U.S. self-perception, if you like, the other half being rule-driven and codified. If you're missing the heart, you go to the heartlands—where Superman comes from. A character like Batman is the other guy, the one who was shot a bunch of times and came back. He's about self-reliance: there's always enough left in you to claw your way back. It's dustbowl stuff, and it's universal. 

What are you reading lately?
My list of to-reads is endless. I carry some stuff around with me—Borges, Lem, some other things. I'm mostly writing, though, and I find it can get in the way.

What are you writing now?
Ahhhh, well. That would be telling. But let's say it's got six main characters, alchemy, semiotics, time travel and Greek politics.

What could possibly go wrong?

Author photo by Chris Close

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tigerman.

Without question, Tolkien set the standard for worldbuilding. Readers of epic fantasy aren’t content with a few generations of kings mentioned in some measly footnotes; they want a world so vast and detailed that it could be real. With Tolkien’s template in mind, George R.R. Martin addresses fans’ demands for a truly epic history.

While fantasy readers have long immersed themselves in Martin’s mega-best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” introduced thousands more to his world full of dragons, magic and brutal murders of (spoiler alert!) everyone. At the risk of further delaying the author from writing the sixth book in the series, BookPage called Martin to talk about his new encyclopedic history of Westeros and beyond, The World of Ice and Fire.

“The [Song of Ice and Fire] world is full of stories, just as our world is,” Martin says. “Because I’ve been writing about this world for so many years now, the world has become very real to me, and I can see all these other stories, and part of me wants to tell them, too. . . . If I had all the time in the world, I could easily write novels about the reign of Aegon III or Aegon IV, the Dance of the Dragons or the romance between King Aerys I and his queen. There are a lot of stories there to be told.”

Talk about an understatement. Martin’s novels are brimming with references to untold history and legends, and if he pursued every tangent, we’d never get to the end of the story. Even The World of Ice and Fire, which is intended to be the definitive historical volume for the Seven Kingdoms, can only briefly touch on the wealth of tales here. The storytelling possibilities are limitless—which is the reason why Martin is still charmingly enthusiastic about this world, even after inhabiting it for the last 20 years.

The Eyrie, copyright © Ted Nasmith. Reprinted with permission of Random House.

In response to fans’ constant requests for extended genealogies and fleshed-out, panoramic histories, Martin announced in 2006 that he would begin writing this companion book. “There’s a great thirst on the part of some of the fans for more and more details about the world,” Martin says. “But I didn’t want to get too close to the so-called present day of Westeros, because I don’t want to give away any of the developments in the coming novels.”

The full history of the Seven Kingdoms exists in Martin’s brain—a magic trick if there ever was one—but even the author’s vast imagination needs some help keeping it straight. Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson, founders of the fan site Westeros.‌org, have been studying (and fact-checking) the details of Martin’s world for years. As co-writers, they pored over 10,000 pages of novels, pulling out all references to history, myths and legends. After they organized and formed the book’s structure, Martin stepped in to fill in the blanks.

This is far from a complete and infallible account, however. Where Tolkien was concerned with myth and languages, Martin is fascinated by history—and the challenges of retelling it.

The narrator of The World of Ice and Fire is Maester Yandel, who acknowledges the difficulties in composing this book, though he insists his multitude of sources has provided a mostly complete narrative: “[E]very building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of knowledge, extracted and compiled by many learned men, each of whom builds upon the works of those who preceded him. What one of them does not know is known to another, and little remains truly unknown if one seeks far enough.”

As in our own world, history is written by the victors, who often skew truth toward more flattering legend. In an attempt to condense hundreds of years and to represent disparate cultures’ beliefs while coming to some sort of truthful conclusion, Maester Yandel has presented a history that is undeniably distorted. These far-off places and long-dead men refuse to give up all their secrets. For example, Valyrians insist they descended from dragons, and Ironborns believe they come from fish, but these elements of “history” are born out of religion. Where did these people actually come from? Often the answer is only speculation.

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength—and Martin agrees—is the sumptuous illustrations that bring these stories to life. The author collaborated with Random House on choosing the fantasy artists featured in the book, and the artwork ranges from paintings to digital images, from portraits of kings to gory, blood-soaked battle scenes. Martin especially enjoyed working with Ted Nasmith to create the definitive representations of castles such as Winterfell and Casterly Rock. “We went back and forth to get the look of all those castles exactly as I imagine them,” Martin promises.

One question remains for fans who might hope to find clues in this ambitious companion book: Does history repeat itself? Martin’s cheeky answer: “A resounding yes and no. A bit of maybe.”

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.