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"Jacques Fréhel" was the pseudonym of Alice Télot (1861-1918), and the stories in the present volume were published between 1 June 1888 and 18 February 1903 under that pseudonym in various periodicals, though primarily in La Fronde, a feminist newspaper entirely written by women. Compiled and translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, this collection of stories and prose poems, previously all but impossible to find, is like a series of deeply intoxicating draughts of a liquor of madness, sorrow, ecstasy and splendor. Spanning the moods of Naturalism, Symbolism and Decadence, the pieces of the long-forgotten but brilliant Télot range from the starkly tragic to the hallucinatory, from rustic images of then contemporary Normandy to bizarre scenes of mythology and pseudohistory of the "Bretagne" of Druids, bards and early Christian Saints-from the mysterious boulevards of Paris to the peppery precincts of ancient Egypt. There is every reason why Alice Télot should be included in the quest undertaken by modern feminists to uncover more of the buried heritage of early feminist fiction and The Inn of Tears ought to help give her the credit she deserves for the verve, style and inventiveness of her work as well as its fugitive ideology.

Exceedingly rare, even in the original French, and here translated for the first time into English by Brian Stableford, The Priestesses of Mylitta, first published in 1907, is Jane de La Vaudère's Babylon-set novel of decadence and amour. Revolving around the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author's last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.There is nothing half-hearted about The Priestesses of Mylitta, and no sign that La Vaudère was not as intensely emotionally involved with the project as she generally seemed to be; and the book, doused as it is with homicidal horrors and permeated with the incense of love, will surely delight all fans of her wonderful creations.

In this breathless sequel to Revelations of Time and Space, Brian Stableford guides us through the hours aboard the spaceship Minerva during which psychic contact with the Saturnian intelligences now known as "the Bells" is renewed. In the claustrophobic, would-be Utopia of the small spaceship, with the fate of the disaster-stricken human race at stake, the minutes and hours are as expansive as those during experimental surgery, and that's without the subtle manipulations of time that Denise Corcoran senses are taking place, with the spaceship under the Bells' influence. Will Zephaniah Corcoran's second contact with the Bells answer the questions raised by the first contact? Can Captain Kemmering keep the pressure cooker of the Saturn-orbiting spaceship from exploding? Can the crew of the Minerva, and the human race who are watching from Earth, trust these unearthly intelligences? After the Revelation, a brilliant novel by one of science fiction's great veterans, takes us into the real-time suspense of the characters facing these questions.

Léo Trézenik's The Confession of a Madman, originally published in 1890 and here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most substantial contributions to a subgenre of Romantic fiction that details delusional fantasies: accounts of strange experiences that could be interpreted as supernatural hauntings or as symptoms of mental derangement. Trézenik (1855-1902), who played a significant role in the Decadent Movement, was a former medical student, and might himself have wondered whether he might have been in danger of going mad, those associated with the Movement being routinely accused of insanity by hostile critics. In much the same spirit that they accepted and twisted the charge of "decadence," of course, some of them were not entirely displeased by the questioning of their sanity, and were eager to treat such suspicions as evidence of their genius-and the present novel certainly shows ample evidence of this latter property on the part of its author. The protagonist of The Confession of a Madman never mentions drug use, but the epilogue relating the "factual backcloth" to his delusions is careful to do so, in order to permit the interpretation that the fashionable opiate of the day-morphine-might have made a considerable contribution to the notional narrator's state of mind.

"This is a Snuggly Book."--Title page verso.

The current volume, edited and translated from the French by Brian Stableford, brings together fourteen stories composed in the thriving tradition of "literary Satanism" that was pioneered in the 1820s and continued throughout the century and into the twentieth, which subjected the figure to closer and more skeptical scrutiny than the theologians of the past, attempting a more clinical analysis of the idea.Including such fiendish pieces as "A Dream of Hell" by Gustave Flaubert, which was written when the author was sixteen years old, and "Dead Man's Dale," a classic tale of the Devil by the great Romantic writer Charles Nodier, The Snuggly Satanicon provides a useful additional piece of a much vaster jigsaw comprised by one of the chief imaginary motifs of modern literature, helping to provide a broader glimpse, and hence a more accurate appreciation, of a bigger picture.

Featuring stories by Remy de Gourmont, Catulle Mendès, and many others, The Snuggly Sirenicon is a key collection of the microsubgenre of mermaid fiction, the inherent fascination of that motif ensuring that it is anything but tedious.

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Jeremy Reed's Bad Boys rehabilitates some of his personal obsessions with poets and rock musicians into a rich assemblage of challenging, provocative assessments, in which the field of writing, London's Soho, is also integrated as place into the conceptualisation of the text, as a physical involvement in the work's dynamic.From John's Ashbery's monumental surprises, to the intransigent figure of Kit Marlowe brawling in St Giles, to Hart Crane's sensational suicide, Reed partners his themes with unique sensitivities that expand his focus into what are perceptual relationships, extending by poetic design the art of essay writing into the art of thematically acute empathy.Always the passionate advocate of subcultures, lovers of Jeremy Reed's poetry and fiction will find in these essays the same quintessential motivations of extraordinary imagination that had JG Ballard, himself the subject of one of these pieces, describe Reed's talent as "almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance."

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, almost exclusively remembered today as the author of the prototypical "Masochistic" novel Venus in Furs, was, in fact, a thinker of far-reaching aspirations and abilities. The present volume is one of the first representative collections the Austrian writer's shorter works in over a century.Ranging from Viennese high-society to the lives of minorities in the east of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the tales herein explore Sacher-Masoch's preoccupation with ongoing social disparities, the symbolism of Slavic mythology, and both the cruelty and nobility of the feminine soul. Featuring frenzied romantics, peasants, Sadistic noblewomen, artists, and eccentrics, The Black Gondola and Other Stories offers a new assessment of the fiction of one of the most interesting German-language authors, whose work, encompassing the poetic, macabre, and erotic, was also often surprisingly compassionate.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889), though best known for his contes cruels and his proto science fiction novel L'Ève future, began his career with two volumes of verse, Deux essais de poésie (1858) and Premières poésies (1859), the contents of which are here presented in their entirety as Complete Early Poetry, translated for the first time into English, by Richard Robinson. Under the spell of Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, the young author produced these early exemplars of Decadent verse, which are filled with exoticism, nocturnal fantasies, and mystery. Complete Early Poetry offers further insight into one of the most interesting and eccentric of the French Symbolists.

Gustave Kahn (1859-1936), prominent art critic and one of the founders of the Symbolist -Movement, in 1894 published his first novel, The Mad King, which is here presented for the first time in English in an adept translation by Colin and Sue Boswell. Written when the author was living in Belgium and editing the anarchist review La Société nouvelle, The Mad King, highly experimental in nature, is a minor masterpiece of fin-de-siècle irony, chronicling, with considerable humour, the story of Christian, King of Hummertanz, and his faithful Palace Marshal, the Duke of Sparkling, via unreliable narration, acrobatic syntax, and an exceptionally rich vocabulary.This remarkably eccentric novel, at once a study of symbols, sciences, and philosophies, and composed with a poet's pen, will be a welcome addition to any library of avant-garde literature.

Amanit, is one of the most distinctive works that the highly distinctive Lucie Delarue-Mardrus ever produced, written in 1929, when the author was fifty-four years old, and her meteoric career as a "professional beauty" was far behind her. Here presented in English for the first time, in a translation by Brian Stableford, the novel features the extremely striking, and extremely mysterious, Princess Antigone Antinides, a woman like no other, who, together with the other two principal characters, the scholar Charles-Étienne and the enigmatic Geneviève, engages on an Egyptological adventure of great artistry and sustained suspense. Kaleidoscopic in nature, Amanit is a devil's advocate of a book, which deliberately posits that, however unlikely it might be, true love must be possible, and asks the further question: if it were possible, what would it look like? And it is the hypothetical answer that the story-line provides that makes the story truly bizarre.In addition to the main novel, the current volume also contains two earlier short stories, also previously untranslated, featuring other manifestations of Amanit, thus deepening the reader's insight into the evolution of the principal novel.

Delphi Fabrice's Flowers of Ether, originally appearing as a serial in the "literary supplement" of the daily newspaper La Lanterne, and here rediscovered and translated by Brian Stableford, is, without question, one of the most outrageous entries into the canon of the Decadent Movement. At once an extremely unreliable gossip column, a lost gay novel, and one of the author's more brazen attempts at sensationalism, Flowers of Ether revolves around the adventures of the perverse and mysterious Jean des Glaïeuls, amidst theatres and salons, fortifs and lesbian bordellos. Exploring the seamier side of Parisian social life at the turn of the previous century, Fabrice's novel, replete with bizarre personalities, drug use, orgies and dubious romances, is an intriguing and highly readable text, the perfume of which will intoxicate despite its depravity.

Now largely forgotten, Hersh Dovid Nomberg was once one of the most popular Yiddish writers of his generation, best known for his short stories delving into the concerns and psychologies of those on the margins of society. These eight stories, collected and translated by Daniel Kennedy, center around a motley cast of wanderers and exiles: modern Jews who have left their homes to join Europe's counterculture of bohemians, artists, aesthetes and freethinkers. Tales of rivalry, debauchery and revenge in the Western European diaspora; mournful happenings on snowy mountain peaks; the comings and goings of various oddballs and outcasts in émigré boarding houses, and the pangs of immigrant nostalgia."Nomberg never wrote a sentence that didn't contain the seeds of an idea." - Froyim Kaganovski

The groundbreaking French feminist journal La Fronde, at its height, had a circulation of 100,000 copies a day, and published the work of many of the period's best women writers, one of the greatest talents of that enclave being May Armand Blanc (1874-1904), a somewhat mysterious figure who died prematurely. The current volume gathers together the seventy-six known short stories and prose poems she wrote for the journal, as well as a number of pieces from various other sources. This superb body of work, presented here for the first time in book form, collected and translated by Brian Stableford, might be seen as a travelogue of amour on the road to hell-the heart-rending compositions of an author who, in her careful and meticulous fashion, was the most extreme and the most relentless of the female Symbolists. May Armand Blanc was one of the truly distinctive and eloquent voices of her unfortunately-brief era, and although she was crying in a wilderness, her song warranted being heard and appreciated then, and still does.As love stories go, the two offered here, firmly planted in the field of Decadent Symbolism, are certainly among the most intense in literature, written as they are with a variety of creative energy that was unique to their author.

"The Postmortal Reservation might not be Heaven exactly, but for Peterkin the piano player it's good enough. His afterlife is unclouded by the anxieties of mortality. After all, he's a skeleton. He only has to look in the mirror to see what squishy folk take for the image of death itself. True to their permanent smile, skellies are a happy-go-lucky species. There is nothing they love more than dancing, and cutting a rug with Melissa at the Palais de Danse Macabre, Peterkin thinks he might be at the start of something beautiful. It's true he's not in the best of neighbourhoods, but things are looking up, until ... the incident with the zombies at the train track and the appearance of a suspicious-looking discoloration spreading from the carpal area of his left arm. Soon he has to place himself in the hands, both fleshy and spectral, of experts who might not have his best interests at heart and, humble piano player though he is, play his own part in the fate of the Ghetto itself. Set in a future world where ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies are finally recognised as real, Meat on the Bone is a unique excursion into modes of possible human existence beyond our familiar fleshy mortality. Part grinning graveyard caper, part science fiction, part oddball existentialism, this is a novel in which we learn that one man's death is another man's dance hall."--Back cover.

The three novels contained herein, the authorship of which, in one way or another, was attributed to the fin-de-siècle stage-star Selina Dolaro (1849-1889), were in fact written by the English polymath Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943), in the late 1880s, when he was sojouring in the United States.In The Princess Daphne the experiments of an American mesmerist and his dying lover cause havoc for a collective of struggling artists half a world away, in Notting Hill. In Bella-Demonia, a fast-paced tale of espionage during the Great Game, a disgraced British operative must contend with card sharps, femme fatales and the Russian secret police in order to regain his lost honour. And in the final entry, The Vengeance of Maurice Denalguez, cruelty and deception abound as a society beauty and an enigmatic nobleman make an innocent couple's marriage the battleground for their feuds.Recommended for those who enjoy the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, these three novels will delight fans of period fiction and weird tales alike.

Monada, by French man of letters Gabriel Mourey (1865-1943), is one of the great short story collections of the Decadent Movement. First published in 1894, and here presented for the first time in English, in an excellent translation by Shawn Garrett, the sixteen stories it contains range widely in theme, but are almost all marked by a melancholy mood-of things lost, of things missed. From symbolist fables to bizarre vignettes, from contes cruels to aesthetic reveries, Monada presents the visions of an exceedingly rare talent whose fictional work, until now, has been denied the Anglophone reader. The volume, long and undeservedly forgotten, is certainly worthy of a well-placed position in the Decadent canon.

"Delphi Fabrice" (the pseudonym of Gaston-Henri-Adhémar Risselin, 1877-1937), the most adamant of Jean Lorrain's disciples, is credited with authoring over one hundred books. None, however, is more bizarre than The Red Spider, here presented in English for the first time in a virtuoso translation by Brian Stableford. The novel, seeking to out-Decadent the most decadent of its predecessors, features Andhré Mordann, an ether-drinking hero seemingly modelled on Lorrain himself, who, in this "black, black, black tale"-a tale of true horror and madness-traverses the boulevards of decline, hobnobbing with drunken prostitutes and homosexual strong-men, licentious merrymakers and waterfront idlers-and, of course, the dancer gloved in imperial crimson.

Mathilde-Marie-Georgina-Élisabeth de Peyrebrune (1841-1917), who wrote under the pseudonym of "Georges de Peyrebrune," originally published "A Decadent Woman" in 1886, in two parts in the Revue Bleue. The novella, appearing here for the first time in English, in a translation by Brian Stableford, along with three supplementary tales, is one of Peyrebrune's most flamboyant works, presenting a caricature of a high-profile variety of radical feminism, which is demolished by the narrative in such an excessive fashion that it was evidently written tongue-in-cheek, although it is probable that some readers were oblivious to its sarcastic humor. The three addition tales, "The Fays," a perverse parody of a fairy tale, "The Red Bird," a symbolist account of exotic madness, and "Salome" a spectacular landmark of decadent fantasy, are wonderful examples of Peyrebrune's work when she chose to venture into the avant garde herself.