You're listening to All the Backlist, a weekly show about books that aren't new.

I'm your host for the week, Trisha Brown, and this is episode number 408.5.

Welcome to the show, everybody, and welcome to April.

This is the second month, actually, in a row, that I get to do the first episode of the

month.

Which you probably don't care about, but I kind of like welcome myself to a new month.

So there you are, welcome.

I have got a few books for you today.

I think I'm going to try to sneak in three, don't tell anyone.

And all of them fall under one of my favorite classifications of books, which is Retellings.

There is, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of things to love about retellings of classic

stories.

One of them is that you can do retellings in basically any genre.

Plus if you love the original, it's fun to find little references that you might be

into and might recognize, kind of like little Easter eggs, which, hey, turns out timely.

So that's fun.

But I think maybe my favorite thing about retellings is the way that they allow for stories

to be told in new, different, more inclusive ways and kind of give the creativity to a writer

who might have a different identity or a different perspective than the original authors.

Because let's face it, a lot of the stories that we consider to be recognizable classics,

the kinds of stories that enough people know and recognize that they can be told are

by people like Shakespeare or Jane Austen, white, western writers, telling stories about white

...