Nine top literary works that radically reimagine Shakespeare

Grace Tiffany is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Western Michigan University, an editor of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a translator of Jorge Luís Borges’ writings on Shakespeare, and the author of seven novels, including Will (2004), My Father Had a Daughter (2003), Ariel (2005), The Turquoise Ring (2005), Paint (2013), Gunpowder Percy (2016), and The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (2025).

At Lit Hub Tiffany tagged seven titles that are among the "most engaging and provocative fictional works inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, as well as a Shakespeare biography or two, and one incomparable short story." One entry on the list:

Best Hamlet-Based Novel in Which Ophelia Barks

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

There are so many, many choices in this category, but mine is David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, a highly original, well-told tale of a deaf-mute boy who raises hounds. Like Hamlet, he can’t speak his dark secrets to anyone but us, and his friends and family members only partly know him.

Ophelia? She’s a dog. Don’t laugh. In this book, the domestic situation is appropriately sinister, the account of a dog-breeding enterprise imaginative, and—this from someone who’s almost as far from being a dog person as you could possibly get—the description of dog-Ophelia’s death is intensely moving.

In my experience no stage depiction of mad Ophelia (or rendition of Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s suicide) has come close to it for poignancy.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is on Geraldine Brooks's list of seven great books about dogs, Karen Joy Fowler's top ten list of books about intelligent animals, and the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on dogs, and among ten of the best Twinkies in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue