This book is a translation into English of the French fairy tale La Princesse et l'Araignee by the poet Chaunes. Somewhere between heaven and earth, fairy tales teach us what should be remembered of the real world and what is best forgotten. Magic is of course an excuse, because the reader is well aware of all the places he or she will be led to. Readers are astute enough to know that all the characters of a fairy tale are predestined, that the parts they play belong to an eternal cycle which necessarily must return to the point of departure and that the whole choreography has only one single purpose: to start from point A and then to travel back towards it via a most unexpected path, which must seem at first extremely unlikely, but which will emerge, as the story progresses, to be the best possible route, perhaps in fact the ONLY route. And since the aim is also, through a tale, to show up the world for what it is, any good story opens up a way, at another level, to enter a new kind of magical realism, which escapes the constraints of ordinary events and reveals hidden aspects of reality."