Appearing here together for the first time in English, in an exquisite translation by Brian Stableford, are the two markedly different novels issued by Renée Vivien under the title of A Woman Appeared to Me.
First published in 1904 and 1905, these masterpieces of symbolist fiction recount Vivien’s obsessive, torturing love affairs, most especially with the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney. Originally received with hostility due to their fervent championship of lesbianism, these highly sophisticated specimens of poetic prose, which offer an unusual combination of delicacy and fervor, economy and flamboyance, today can be seen as groundbreaking, and quite unparalleled, confessions of the pain and despair of intense amour.

A Woman Appeared to Me

Literature & Fiction

Vivien, Renée

Essays & Correspondence

Snuggly Books

Originally published in 1898, From a Faraway Land, here translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, is one of the quintessential collections of Symbolist short fiction, by Remy de Gourmont, one of France’s greatest writers.
With their sophisticated understatement, and hybridization of the narrative techniques and strategies developed by the suppliers of newspaper fiction with those of Baudelairean prose poetry, these stories employ symbolism in its most extreme form, that of allegory, and are unquestionably among the author’s most refined accomplishments.

From a Faraway Land

de, Gourmont Remy

Short Stories & Anthologies

Here, presented in English in a long-belated translation by Brian Stableford, is Isis, the first novel of the acclaimed author of Contes cruels, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Deserving to be reckoned as one of the foundation-stones of Decadent prose fiction, redolent with echoes of Byron and Poe, reconfigured in the Baudelairean manner, and flamboyant with Gautieresque elements, this book is a tour de force of extravagant implication and esthetic dexterity: a work of peculiar genius.
In its vaulting ambitions, its quirky mannerisms, its philosophical posturing and its lush descriptions, Isis is certainly a tale given to excess, but that excess is the essence of the endeavor, the wand of its enchantment.

Isis

Villiers De L'Isle-Adam, Auguste

Stableford,Brian

World Literature

Simon Cannick, with the dubious assistance of possible extraterrestrial influence, seems to have largely recovered from his temporary death, his peculiar and continual lapses into dreamspace notwithstanding. However, fate, like the neider, is hydra-formed. Douglas Jefferson is willing to play dirty in the long game of inheritance and the longer game of resentment; Simon’s half-sister, Marianne, and her unruly female descendants arrive at St. Madoc en masse and prove far from gentle in their attempts to unearth family secrets; and now Rome wishes to speak to Simon, too, or at least one Father Thomas Mallory, of the Order of Preachers, who might have some interesting information to share, if Simon is willing to disclose what he knows in return.
The third and concluding instalment in the cosmic labyrinth of Brian Stableford’s Morgan’s Fork series offers no easy answers. Instead, Simon Cannick is drawn, almost against his will, into a tenebrous enlightenment, guided only by the dreaming, alien voices of The Truths of Darkness.

The Truths of Darkness

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

The nine stories gathered here as The Turquoise Ring and Other Stories, written by the Costa Rican born Rafaela Contreras, were originally published in newspapers in El Salvador and Guatemala during the short period between 1890-91, but never appeared in book form during the author’s lifetime. Composed in an almost fairytale-like style, with approaches that suggest a proto-modernismo, in some ways her work anticipates the literary line which her husband, Rubén Darío, would explicitly develop, but it also contains elements that might have taken a different direction had she lived longer, dying as she did at the early age of twenty-three, in 1893.
The present edition, translated by Jessica Sequeira, is the first English language offering of Contreras’s stories, which range from fables to prose poems, from the exotic to the supernatural, and are both entertaining and moving by turns, embarking on unusual and subtle forays into different realms of human experience, in the author’s own tones.

The Turquoise Ring: and Other Stories

Contreras, Rafaela

‘Tell me strange things’ the dandified clergyman and vampirologist Montague Summers was wont to say. With this volume, Summers’ enthusiastic contribution to the tradition of ghostly and gothic fiction, readers can at last encounter a full-fledged collection of his own strange tales. Unpublished during his lifetime, despite its exquisite quality, which was attested to by the author and medievalist M. R. James, Six Ghost Stories displays a range from the gruesome to the grotesquely comic, presenting posthumous vendettas, a bibliophile who unwittingly seeks domestic help from an unusual location, a toy theatre that affords its new owner a glimpse into the bloodiest tragedy of the Victorian stage, and other spectral intrusions. These pieces showcase Summers’ love of scandal, diablerie and the theatre, as well as offering a fascinating glimpse into the creative process of one of the most colourful men of Edwardian letters.

Six Ghost Stories

Summers, Montague

Genre Fiction

Long out of print in English, and here offered for the first time in a restored format, The Twilight of the Gods, Élémir Bourges’ acknowledged masterpiece, was originally published in March, 1884, just two months before J.-K. Huysmans’ groundbreaking À rebours. Both novels at once laid the groundwork for the Decadent Movement, and presented a striking challenge to Naturalism by, instead of depicting common existence, offering case studies of exceptional, extravagant beings. 
In Bourges’ highly aesthetic work, we follow Charles d’Este, Duke of Blankenburg, who, along with his eccentric family, is exiled to Paris, where his excessive, luxurious lifestyle and the Wagnerian fate that follows him are like a chandelier falling from the sky.

The Twilight of the Gods

Bourges, Élémir

Here, presented for the first time in paperback format, and limited edition hardcover, is an unabridged edition of Count Eric Stenbock’s third and last collection of poetry, which was originally published in 1893, in a very limited number of copies, and which is now extremely scarce.

The shadow of death

Stenbock, Eric

Stenbock, Count

Stenbock, Stanislaus

Mephistophela, among the most unsettling works of the prolific author Catulle Mendès, was originally published in 1889 and is presented here for the first time in English in a superb translation by Brian Stableford. Telling the story of Baronne Sophor d’Hermelinge, a woman as thoroughly martyrized by her creator as any other heroine in the history of fiction, in spite of the enormous competition for that title established by countless writers, male and female, it is one of the archetypal novels of the Decadent Movement, and one of the most striking, precisely because is it such a discomfiting piece of writing, the deliberately controversial nature of which has been further enhanced as its surrounding social context has changed over time. Highly influential, especially on the works of such writers as Jean Lorrain and Renée Vivien, Mephistophela, in placing lesbian amour in the foreground of the story, deals forthrightly and intensively with a literary theme that had previously only been treated with delicacy and indecision, mostly in poetry. It is essentially a horror story about demonic possession, about contrived and cruel damnation, devoid even of a Faustian pact, which merely employs obsessive lesbian desire as an instrument of damnation.

Mephistophela

Mendès, Catulle

Sentimental Stories by Guatemalan born Enrique G mez Carrillo, man of letters, duelist and dandy, originally published in 1900 and here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Jessica Sequeira, is an exquisite selection of nine tales that covers the ground from desire to insanity, fulfillment in erotic love to suffering in intense anguish. In these stories of solitary figures struggling with incorrigible sentimentality, we meet an aspiring poet who becomes obsessed with what he believes to be Cleopatra's wig, an eccentric doctor who sells a cure for artistic enthusiasm to fictional writers and artists, and a military man who suffers from jealousy due to an anonymous letter, all told with the light touch of a writer who found beauty in surfeit and exaggeration, dissolution and extravagance.

Sentimental Stories

Gómez Carrillo, Enrique

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