Oscar Wilde 
House of Pomegranates 

Oscar Wilde supposedly said that these fables were "intended neither for the British child nor the British public". A follow-up to his first popular fairy-tale collection (’The Happy Prince and Other Tales’), 'A House of Pomegranates’ (1891) is indeed decidedly darker and more adult. The collection includes "The Young King", "The Birthday of the Infanta, "The Fisherman of his Soul", and "The Star Child". While similar, in some ways, to the fairy-tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm these have a certain interesting Wilde flair to them that is hard to pinpoint. –