Books published by Snuggly Books

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.

Presented here for the first time in English, in translations by Brian Stableford, the current volume contains two novels of the occult by Gilbert-Augustin Thierry (1843-1915), which were originally published in serial form in the Revue des deux mondes.The first, The Blonde Tress (1888), addresses the question of the fundamental morality of a metaphysical system by which individuals are doomed by fate to expiate sins that they have not committed. It introduces an extra twist-taken from the Old Testament-in which people are not even required to compensate for alleged misdeeds of their own immortal soul but for sins committed by their forefathers.The second novel, The Mask (1894), is an important and intriguing contribution to the late nineteenth-century boom in fantasies featuring Egyptian mummies. Its intense interest in the psychology of reincarnation gives it an extra dimension of complication that differentiates it markedly from the majority of the thrillers and "karmic romances" employing the same motif that followed hot on its heels, and it is certainly entitled to be considered the most interesting work exploring the theme produced before the Great War.

In Greek mythology, the asphodel is a flower associated with death; the souls of ordinary mortals are sent to the Asphodel Meadows, vast fields of the underworld. In the twelve stories of Asphodels, Mexican author Bernardo Couto Castillo (1879-1901), a cult figure in Mexico due to his short life and French-influenced Decadent writings, explores death in its many varieties, from Lady Death wandering the streets of the city in merciless search of her next victim, to a hypochondriac who goes mad out of fear of death, to an ultra-refined killer turning to murder due to the beauty of its "symphony in White and Red", to the extraordinary final metaphysical account of the torture of a soul. Although asphodels do not make a single appearance in this collection, they are like death itself: invisible, everywhere. Asphodels, originally published in 1897, was the only book to appear in the author's lifetime. Presented here for the first time in English, in a superb translation by Jessica Sequeira, it will be sure to gratify lovers of Decadent fiction, horror and modernismo.