Hare (Blue Eyes), by Valerie Hammond © The artist. Courtesy Planthouse, New York City

Had I known that Aesop’s fables were so unhinged, I would’ve turned to them long ago. Having encountered your standard-issue tortoise and hare, boy who cried wolf, town mouse and country mouse, et al., I assumed the other seven-hundred-odd stories would contain the same simplistic finger wagging. Well, I was wrong. Robin Waterfield’s Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation (Basic Books, $30) renders them in all their feral, fatalistic glory—bursts of Hobbesian asperity with dubious, sometimes conflicting, morals. To live is to struggle, they…