10 Magical Books for Adults Who Love Disney

Captain James Benjamin Hook is not your typical pirate. He's a witty and highly educated privateer who has been forced into the role of a villain against a pack of malicious little boys in a pointless war that never ends. Neverland is no fairy-tale for him, not with everyone eager to kill him and repeat the cycle of their story over and over again. 

Then Stella Parrish, a forbidden grown woman, dreams her way to the Neverland. Captain Hook is not the bad guy she thought he would be, and soon she sees something in him that the so-called heroes refuse to. She might be Hook's last chance for redemption and release if they can break his curse before Pan and his warrior boys hunt her down and drag Hook back to their never ending game.

We usually think of fairy tales as being stories for children to fall asleep to at bedtime. But the tales of old were dark, violent, and often highly erotic. This collection, put together by legendary editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Wilding, brings the disturbing and sexual subtext of this genre to the forefront. 

Authors like Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, and Nancy Kress offer their retellings of beloved stories. In Tanith Lee’s “Snow-Drop,” a lonely artist invites seven circus performers into her home to satisfy an obsession. Neil Gaiman depicts a boy haunted into adulthood by a creature who wants to devour his soul in "Troll Bridge." 

Aerin is an outcast in her own father’s court, the daughter of a woman who everyone claims was a witch who unwittingly enchanted the King into marrying her. Left to her own devices, she discovers an old recipe for dragon-fire-proof ointment in a dusty corner of her father’s library. After two years of secret experimentation, she decides to try the ointment out for real. 

The perfect opportunity presents itself when reports emerge from a nearby village of a marauding dragon burning homes to cinders. With her father’s lame, retired warhorse, Talat, by her side, she rides off to be a hero. This dragon, however, isn't the creature of Aerin's fairy-tales. Maur is the legendary Black Dragon who has not been seen for generations, and now he has awakened to wreak havoc across the land.

When Delilah Marlow visits a famous traveling carnival, Metzger's Menagerie, she expects to see clowns and acrobats and fake magic. What she doesn't predict is that she'll be captured by the owners and put on exhibition, shown to the world as a sharp-clawed creature she never knew was lurking beneath her skin. 

Now, she's forced to perform in town after town, kept alongside a cavalcade of mermaids, gryphons, kelpies, and other beautiful, terrifying creatures of myth and legend. They all want their freedom. To get it, Delilah will have to delve deep into her most monstrous side and discover her true purpose.

Donald is a young fisherman, eking out a lonely living on the west coast of Scotland. One night he witnesses something miraculous: a seal takes to the land and transforms into a woman. In a moment of panic, he grabs the skin and hides it, leaving the woman trapped on land until she can retrieve it. He then forces himself on her and drags her home to be his wife. 

His action changes lives: not just his own or the selkie's but those of his entire community. They must all deal with the consequences of what he's done.

Recently evacuated to the British countryside as the Second World War ravages Britain, one young girl finds herself adrift in a new place with no purpose. Her parents are either out of the picture or unconcerned with her. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. 

Award-winning novelist A.S. Byatt takes inspiration from her own childhood in this retelling of Nordic mythology. The young protagonist explores these stories and dreams that the Germans are planning to kidnap her mother and father. During the uncertainty of war, there is something comforting about the totality of the gods, although they carried their own burdens too. The stories of old carry us to the present through Byatt's eyes.

There are few texts more important to the culture of Hinduism than the Ramayana (also known as Valmiki Ramayana.) The epic narrates the life of Rama, the seventh avatar of the god Vishnu, and his journey into the forest as he serves 14 years in exile. 

The Ramayana is one of the true epics of its kind, and has been adapted into countless novels, movies, plays, TV series, and has even been referenced in video games. There's a reason it's withstood the test of time and remains beloved several centuries after it was first written.

Italian writer Italo Calvino was a critical darling, best known for his postmodernist novel If on a winter's night a traveler, but he was also a lover of classic folktales from his native country. Italian Folktales, published in 1956, is a collection of 200 stories that covers an extensive period in Italian history and various stories that have become a crucial part of fairy-tale lore. 

Calvino's versions are often altered to make them more accessible to wider audiences. Considered one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind, it's no wonder that the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin described it as being "to Italian literature what the Grimms' collection is to German literature."

Yei Theodora Ozaki, the British-Japanese daughter of a baron, rejected her father's desires for her to marry and be a docile wife and instead became a tutor and translator. While in Japan, she began collecting local fairy-tales and stories and translated them into English. 

While her versions are rather liberally adapted, they became a big hit and are still read regularly today. Her most famous collection, Japanese Fairy Tales, was first published in 1908 and is still in print. The stories included within—there are 22 here—include “The Jellyfish and the Monkey,” “The Son of a Peach,” and "The Stones of Five Colors and the Empress Jokwa."

You’ve seen the Disney film, you know all the songs, and you’ve dreamed about that golden yellow dress for decades. But have you read the original fairy tale? 

Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve was a French novelist whose works were crucial in shaping the entire concept of the fairy tales for centuries of readers and writers alike. La Belle et la Bête, which was published in 1740, is the oldest known modern variant of the Beauty and the Beast story, which has countless variations and cultural reinventions to its names. 

The original version is extremely different from the version most people know and love today: Beauty is a princess; the Beast has to deal with an evil fairy who has control over his life; and there's a whole bunch of faked deaths, child-swapping, and magical battles.