Just like Andersen, the Grimm brothers or Isak Dinesen, A. S. Byatt understands that fairytales are not written for children. She makes this clear in her Little Black Book of Stories, a collection of five short stories in which she challenges all the norms of the fairytale by providing a black vision of childhood tales. The realism of her characters and her terrifying tales of monsters and all kinds of sordid creatures pull us into a strange universe, situated half-way between the real and the fantastic.

Born in 1962, Sjón is today one of the best-known representatives of Icelandic culture. He is a poet and and a novelist and has also written songs for Björk. In his two novels,The Blue Fox (Rivages, Prix littéraire du Conseil nordique in 2005) and the Sur la paupière de mon père, he shows his capacity to appropriate the myths of his country and to mix them with stories which are as poetic as they are crazy.

Pascal Quignard is one of the most important figures in the contemporary writing in France. Born in 1948 into a family of organ players, he is a cellist himself. Music is the subject of much of his published work and forms an integral part of his writing. In Boutès, a fascinating study on the astonishing and bewitching power of music, he pursues his thoughts on this theme through a poetic and personal rewriting of the legend of the Argonauts. He also adopts the form and the norms of the fairytale in this book, inspired by an inexhaustible variety of tales from Greek mythology. Boutès is a personal and lyrical re-writing of the legend of the Argonauts and the largely unknown character of Boutès himself.