The oldest stories, and the writers who keep going back to them. Fairy tales were never for children. They were compressed instruction on how a world works and what it costs to cross it, and the good ones still carry that weight.
About this shelf
The Grimms collected theirs to preserve a disappearing oral tradition; what they wrote down retains the punishments and the mutilations that later editions sanded off. Amal El-Mohtar's The River Has Roots takes "The Twa Sisters," the murder ballad where a drowned girl's bones become a singing harp, and gives it back its teeth.
Amos Tutuola wrote from Yoruba oral tradition directly, in an English entirely his own, and produced something English critics in 1954 had no framework for. Brian Froud's Good Faeries/Bad Faeries is the illustrated book that shaped how a generation pictures the fae: earthy, wrinkled, and not remotely safe. William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods catalogs the monsters American loggers swore were out there, described with the deadpan precision of a naturalist's field guide.
Also here: Owen Barfield's The Silver Trumpet, the first children's fantasy published by an Inkling, written before Narnia and before Middle-earth.
No inflated list prices, no fake sales, and no membership required. US shipping is a flat $7 per order.