“CALL ME ISHMAELLE” AND OTHER BIPOC REMIXED CLASSICS

If someone told me Moby-Dick—yes, that thicc whale book—could be turned into a subversive, feminist, kaleidoscopic odyssey, I would’ve squinted like Queequeg sizing up a harpoon. Enter Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo: a rollicking and utterly uncontainable retelling of Herman Melville’s leviathan of a novel.

Xiaolu Guo’s novel is a feminist reimagining of Melville’s epic told through the eyes of Ishmaelle, a Chinese woman who leaves behind land, nation, and convention to work aboard a 19th-century whaling ship. As Ishmaelle moves between ports, lovers, and ships, the novel tracks her search for autonomy—intellectual, sexual, political—while interrogating empire, labor, gender, and the violent mythmaking rampant in the original text. The whale is still there, but the fixation shifts: this is less about obsession and conquest than it is about survival, determination, and what it means to narrate your own life when the world insists on telling your story for you.

If Moby-Dick has always felt like homework you never emotionally recovered from, Call Me Ishmaelle might be your way back in.

Reading Call Me Ishmaelle sent me down a familiar path. Once you experience a classic refracted through a BIPOC lens, not as homage but as a full-on argument, it’s honestly hard to go back. These retellings don’t just modernize old stories; they poke at them, pull at loose threads, and ask uncomfortable questions about who got left out the first time around. Sometimes the result is romantic, sometimes it’s brutal, sometimes it’s just funny. But it almost always changes how you think about the original.

Below are eight of my favorite remixed classics, written by BIPOC authors, that take the canon and bring forward something entirely new.

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

A queer, Vietnamese reimagining of The Great Gatsby narrated by Jordan Baker.

Jordan Baker finally gets the story she deserves. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Vo reimagines Gatsby’s glittering world through the eyes of a queer, Vietnamese-American adoptee navigating Jazz Age excess, racial passing, and quiet magic. The novel is lush and mournful, interrogating who gets to belong in America’s grandest illusions and at what cost.

Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

A feminist, queer dismantling of Cinderella.

In Cinderella Is Dead, happily-ever-after is a lie enforced by law. Set generations after Cinderella’s myth has been weaponized to control women, this dystopian fantasy follows Sophie, a queer Black girl determined to dismantle the story that governs her world. It’s sharp, angry, and deliberately uninterested in romance as salvation.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Island of Doctor Moreau set in 19th-century Mexico.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau reframes H.G. Wells’s tale of scientific horror through the perspective of Carlota Moreau, the doctor’s isolated daughter. Moreno-Garcia interrogates colonialism, patriarchy, and bodily autonomy, turning a story about monstrous experiments into one about inherited violence and moral awakening.

Jackal by Erin E. Adams

A horror remix of Little Red Riding Hood.

Jackal draws on African-diasporic folklore to tell a dark, genre-bending story about vengeance, inheritance, and feminine rage. Adams reworks the trickster archetype into something feral and contemporary, blending horror, myth, and social realism into a novel that refuses moral simplicity.

James by Percival Everett

Retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view.

Everett retells Mark Twain’s novel from the perspective of Jim—here, James—transforming a sidelined figure into a fully realized man with interiority, strategy, and rage. The result is a blisteringly intelligent novel about language, freedom, and the performance of identity under slavery, one that fundamentally alters how the original can ever be read again.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

A Bushwick based remix of Pride and Prejudice.

Pride relocates Austen’s courtship drama to a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, where class tensions are as sharp as ever and first impressions can still ruin everything. Zuri Benitez and her tight-knit Afro-Latinx family clash with the wealthy newcomers across the park, and what unfolds is a smart, socially attuned love story about pride, place, and belonging.

Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev

A rare Persuasion remix—and a good one.

In Recipe for Persuasion, Austen’s second-chance romance becomes a modern story about family expectations, public scandal, and the pressure of cultural tradition. Set in the world of competitive cooking and Indian-American family life, the novel balances romance with a thoughtful examination of ambition, regret, and reinvention.

We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

A postcolonial reimagining of King Lear set in India.

We That Are Young transposes Shakespeare’s tragedy into contemporary India where a powerful business patriarch divides his empire among his daughters. The novel explores misogyny, political violence, and familial cruelty with devastating precision, proving how eerily adaptable Lear’s bones are to modern power structures.

Taken together, these books make a strong case for revisiting the canon with a little skepticism (and a lot more curiosity). They don’t treat the originals as sacred texts so much as starting points: stories worth questioning and sometimes outright dismantling. Reading them isn’t about “fixing” the classics; it’s about seeing what happens when new voices take the wheel and steer them somewhere unexpected. Once you start, the old versions don’t disappear; they just feel incomplete. And honestly, that’s kind of the point.