From the translator: Imaginal is a made-up French word. It contains pieces from the words “imagination”, “magic” and “Epinal”. And Epinal is a town in the north-east of France, where every May since 2002, the well-known throughout France (as well as Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg) festivals of fantastic literature “Les Imaginales” - those same Imaginals - are held with competitions, role-playing board and card games, a book fair, body painting, literary prizes and everything, everything, everything that is expected at a decent festival. And Imaginales are annual anthologies of fantasy stories from the publishing house Mnémos. Every year (since 2009) the publishing house offers writers different themes for stories: “Kings and Captains”, “Bards and Sirens”, “Elves and Assassins”, “Fairies and Automata”, “Trolls and Unicorns”... And the writers enthusiastically welcome this challenge - be it masters, debutants, or toothy and already proven young shoots. Here you will find stories little by little pulled from anthologies of different years - pulled to the tastes and preferences of readers who were not too lazy to leave detailed reviews about these collections on the GoodReads websites and Babelio. The stories are heterogeneous in level and different in “flavor” - there are deliberately “feminine”, there are “male” ones, there are funny ones, there are sad ones, there are adventures, crimes and simply the mysteries of life, there is banter on already classic works, there is a “traditional” approach to declared theme, there are attempts to be original, here are excursions into history, here is today's Paris, here are fictional worlds, in short - for every taste. From the first eight seasonal (2009–2016) anthologies, here are taken one story, sometimes two, sometimes three; There are still many good stories left out of this collection that would not hurt to be included in it, but the best is the enemy of the good. So, before you is a sort of hodgepodge that casts a ray of light on modern French fantasy for us.