Like Alice in Wonderland? How about The Princess Bride? Meet James Thurber’s sublimely re-vamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks.

The hands of all thirteen clocks stand still in the gloomy castle on a lonely hill where a wicked Duke lives with his niece, the beautiful Princess Saralinda. The Duke fancies he has frozen time, for he is afraid that one day a Prince may come and win away the hand of the Princess—the only warm hand in the castle. To thwart that fate, he sets impossible tasks for Saralinda’s suitors. But when the bold Prince Zorn of Zorna arrives, the cold Duke may at last have met his match.

“This book . . . is probably the best book in the world. And if it’s not the best book, then it’s still very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever really seen anything like it since. . . . It’s unique. It makes people happier, like ice cream.” —Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline

Paperback edition with illustrations by Marc Simont.