Books published by Snuggly Books

Zephaniah Corcoran has just returned to Earth after a seven-year jaunt to Jupiter where his special—some would say dubious—talents were put to the test in attempted communication with the Jovian cloud-whales. With no time to adjust to life on an Earth half alarmed and half fatalistic at the prospect of final catastrophe, he is headhunted for a reprise of his old job: being projected by the brilliant but asocial Walter Halleck’s Coincidence-driven Sling into the far future to make empathic contact with the various successors to the human race. In the meantime, he is discovering a close and mysterious bond with Denise, a doctor of evolutionary biology and the younger sister he has hardly known, who has been noticed by the same big players who have noticed Zeph. But nothing goes quite according to plan, and as the fate of humanity dangles on a thread grown very frayed, Zeph’s empathic skills are expanded in unexpected ways, not so much by coincidence, as by Coincidence, bringing Zeph and those around him into contact with what are perhaps only the beginning of ongoing revelations of time and space whose grandeur match the universe that Zeph and his colleagues must now begin to explore.

Words are an obscure form of consciousness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . we are always left with blank spaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  question marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  gaps! Language leaves us up a hill without a creek. This is the explanation!

Presented here for the first time in a single volume, is the entire corpus of short fiction by Edward Heron-Allen, one of England's most intriguing, and unnecessarily obscure, authors. From "The Suicide of Sylvester Gray," the novella which was an inspiration for The Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, a friend of Heron-Allen's, to "The Cheetah Girl," an outrageous masterpiece of biological science fiction, the present collection is a tour de force of the elegant, the bizarre, and the unmentionable.With a total of thirty tales, the five volumes contained herein, many of which have previously only been obtainable for exorbitant prices, are now finally available in a proper format for connoisseurs, and the unafraid.

There was something about Claus Laufenburg that drew them, mothers and daughters, princes and paupers, spicy Spaniards and jet-set Swedes, to him. Was it his dangerous swagger, his arts and skills of passion, or the glittering universe of his gigantic collection of Rumanian limited edition hardbacks?In these five stories of reckless lust and steaming blood, filthy talk and degenerate banter, by five of the boldest voices in the New Pleasant Movement, the reader is invited to explore the ins and outs of one of Germany's most beloved bibliophiles as he moves through the world of physical matter. The book that Hollywood refused. Contents:Quentin S. Crisp: Who Is Claus Laufenburg?Damian Murphy: One Thousand Sleeping Souls Lie Best Unknowing and DistressedJames Champagne: DreamachineJustin Isis: Claus and the Transgressive EnglishmanBrendan Connell: Die geheime Kraft des Sex

Gathered together and translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, the current volume contains three bizarre novellas of the paranormal by Gilbert-Augustin Thierry (1843-1915), originally published in periodicals of the day. Written when the author was heavily involved with the French Occult Revival, these feverish tales of reincarnation and redemption are prime examples of an intriguing and much-ignored subspecies of supernatural fiction, and, plunging readers directly into an imaginative environment of suspended disbelief, lack neither in narrative verve nor flamboyance.

Fards and Poisons, originally published in 1903 and here made available for the first time in English in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the more eccentric works of the ever-eccentric Jean Lorrain. Defying the standard narrative expectations of short stories, the items in this volume might be seen as a series of gossipy character sketches, of actresses and mystics, gigolos and dowagers, of an entire rogues gallery of fin de siècle types, which help explain how the author gained a reputation for corrupting public morals by literary means. Resembling fragments excised from a kind of endless series of conversations, the result is a strange literary collage that is perhaps the most quintessential of Lorrain's works: the slice of his life that pins his own literary persona most precisely, like a lepidopterist's long pin.Included in the current volume, and for the first time republished since its initial appearance in Le Journal, is also the short story "Victim", for which Lorrain was disastrously sued, and convicted of, libel, the court imposing a massive punitive fine on the author and sentencing him to two months imprisonment, though the rulings were later overturned.

"O that fine octagonal face of his-the great dark thoughtful eyes-the straight broad nose pointed at its low tip-the wide firm mouth with its full lower lip, curbed by the very thin bow of the upper-the very square strong jaw-the expression insolent because modest, imperious because shy,-but a face which could smile. And O the robust and generous young form, noble and opulent in contour-the ardent force restrained of him. To me, from the beginning, he was something apart, an individual whom one must either abhor, or adore-nothing else-and, as I saw him close for the first time, staring at him quite unreservedly, I knew what my feelings were."Here, presented for the first time in paperback format, is Amico di Sandro, the unfinished novel by Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. Baron Corvo, dealing with the rambunctious life of Sandro Botticelli.An eccentric tale of art and Renaissance times for the connoisseur.

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.