Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, almost humorous tale of urban solitude and alienation that outlines the mediocrity of bureaucratic existence.Jean Dezert is an office worker employed by the ministry, who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city and consumer ...
First published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, <I>The King in the Golden Mask</I> gathers 21 of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, r ...
First published in French in 1893, <I>Sweating Blood</I> describes the atrocities of war in 30 tales of horror and inhumanity from the pen of the «Pilgrim of the Absolute,» Leon Bloy. Writing with blood, sweat, tears and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own experiences as a guerilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and pathos, an ...
Originally published in Danish in 1910, <I>Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah</I> is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, <I>Kzradock</I> is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mystici ...
Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the «ungrateful beggar» and «pilgrim of the absolute,» Leon Bloy. <I>Disagreeable Tales</I>, first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry ...
When Marcel Schwob published <I>The Book of Monelle</I> in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarme, Alfred Jarry and Andre Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ...
Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' <I>A Dilemma</I> remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siecle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works—his 1881 <I>Against Nature</I>, which came to de ...
"Peppered with moments of political satire and heartfelt introspection, Stephens’s novel also offers a fun-house depiction of the absurdities and horrors of the surveillance state. This is an excellent debut." — Publishers Weekly Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there—thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways—has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childho ...
An unnamed man, in the wake of a breakup, begins frequenting a peepshow arcade where closeted men meet for anonymous sex. The arcade is a strange world, one where questions of power, race, and class collide with unhinged sexual desire, with fetishes, fantasies, and even occasionally love.The protagonist explores this curious new place, where many of society's rules are thrown out and replaced with a very specific code of conduct. After bein ...
