In retelling folk stories with new female perspectives, The Vanishing Princess’s closest ally is Angela Carter. takes up one aspect of feminine experience and inflates it into a beautiful and monstrous parable. In The Vanishing Princess, her characters are to a degree her avatars, sometimes in their reenactments of scenes and themes detailed elsewhere in memoirs and essays, always in the trenchant thinking that makes their stories - and hers - memorable. In all her writing, Diski turned her sharply observant gaze on the stuff of the world - people, places, books, things, oncologist appointments - and then thought hard not only about that stuff, but about the thoughts generated by that stuff and the thoughts further generated by those thoughts. In so doing, they not infrequently stretch the boundaries of realism. The book’s other stories begin in the cold reality of women’s daily lives.What makes these stories quintessentially Diski is the way they balance between the sometimes mundane, sometimes grim, sometimes arresting detail of those lives and the spiraling thoughts of the characters who inhabit them. The three fairy tales that anchor the book speak both to Diski’s timelessness and to her contemporary feminist perspicuity. Those who read Diski for the first time are in for the delight of discovery. Those who know only the self-elegizing Diski will encounter the expansive parameters of her imagination and intellect. Longtime fans will celebrate the very fact of more Diski and thrill to familiar preoccupations in new settings and shapes.

Each one will bring a little sparkle and a lot of joy to your life this holiday season.Diski’s wonderful story collection, The Vanishing Princess, holds riches for all. Be sure not to miss these top-notch new releases coming out this month. After all, winter is the perfect time to snuggle up under a blanket with a good read. These books go great with Christmas cookies and hot cocoa, and they'll certainly give you a good escape from your crazy AF family. The holiday season is certainly hectic, so be sure to give yourself some time to get lost in a fantastic book. Basically, you should just cancel all your plans, because you're going to get sucked into some A+ storytelling.) (But, of course, that's not to say that these books don't bring with them a page-turning plot. And after all, as the cold comes in, is there anything better than hunkering under the covers and pouring over a beautiful book? If you love to just get lost in the writing of a piece, you're certainly in luck.

This month's reading is filled with books that deliver exquisite prose and surreal stories. After a year of remarkable fiction, it's only fitting that we're closing 2017 with some extraordinary books to match. December 2017 is bringing with it some wonderful new fiction releases. There's no better time than the end of the year to indulge in a good book.

The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski