December's recommendation: The 13 Clocks, by James Thurber.
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. One eye wore a velvet patch; the other glittered through a monocle, which made half his body seem closer to you than the other half. He had lost one eye when he was twelve, for he was fond of peering into nests and lairs in search of birds and animals to maul. One afternoon, a mother shrike had mauled him first. His nights were spent in evil dreams, and his days were given to wicked schemes.
I could quote this whole book at you; there's hardly a bit of it that isn't beautifully written, and only by quoting can I attempt to convey the poetry of Thurber's prose. The lines are filled with alliteration and assonance, slant rhyme hiding in the clauses, rhythms rising out of the words if you read them out loud. "I wish you every strangest kind of luck." Nobody writes like this anymore, I swear.
The story manages to be a fairy tale and a satire of fairy tales, about a Duke who keeps a Princess imprisoned in a castle where it's always Then, never Now, because time froze there seven years ago, and the Duke tells everyone "he had murdered time, slain it with his sword, and wiped his bloody blade upon its beard and left it lying there, bleeding hours and minutes, its springs uncoiled and sprawling, its pendulum disintegrating."
See what I mean about the desire to quote?
And of course a prince comes along, and the Duke sets him an impossible task, because that's what happens in fairy tales. And if the prince fails the Duke will slit him from his guggle to his zatch and then feed him to the geese, only because this is Thurber, the prince goes along for quite some time without knowing what exactly his guggle and his zatch are supposed to be, and when he finds out, he sighs, "I now know what to guard."
The story is a simple one, and short. The joy is in the telling of it, in the words used to tell it, in Thurber's sly humour that somehow manages to take the telling of a fairy tale dead seriously.
Which is, my friends, how it should be done.