Books published by Snuggly Books

Sentimental Stories by Guatemalan born Enrique Gómez 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.

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.

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.

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.

"I am neither a roué nor a degenerate; yet there are days when certain visions rise so definitely before me and I am a prey to such violent desires, that if, hitherto, I have been able to resist their attraction, it is impossible for me to say whether, an hour hence, I shall be able to do so. At other times, I feel strangely weary, as though I had just accomplished some gigantic task. I feel that my bones are broken, my muscles torn, and it is when I wake up that I feel this-when I wake up, after eight hours' sleep and rest, following no excess and troubled by no dreams. . . . I also have fits of inexplicable rage; of fury that would urge me to any crime; preconceived dislikes; I am so sensitive and excitable, that a word, a gesture, are sufficient to unhinge me: I suffer almost physically from all these things."

Here, presented for the first time in paperback format, is an unabridged edition of Count Eric Stenbock's second collection of poetry, which was originally published in 1883, in a very limited number of copies, and which is now extremely scarce.

Here, presented for the first time in paperback format, is an unabridged edition of Count Eric Stenbock's first book of poetry, which was originally published in 1881, in a very limited number of copies, and which is now extremely scarce.

The Turin born Guido Gozzano was the first and finest representative of the Crepuscolari, the poets of the twilight. Before his tragically early death from consumption at the age of thirty-five he produced two short volumes of verse, La via del rifugio and I colloqui, which quickly became renown for their quietly perfect evocations of nature, melancholy, tenderness and ­nostalgia. But unknown to most, Gozzano also wrote short stories, contes cruels influenced by Poe and Maupassant, and aesthetic prose nightmares, which display the same delicate crepuscular style and sense of tragic absurdism.Within the pages of Alcina and Other Stories, the reader will find The Real Face, the bizarre fate of a promising young artist whose works grow too close to nature; A Romantic Story, a Gothic tragedy; and The Soul of the Instrument, a Symbolist fairy tale after the manner of Lorrain or Wilde; along with other dark and fantastic pieces.An exquisite item for those interested in Italian poets of the early twentieth century and the various literary movements which bloomed in that country in the years following the Fin de siècle.

Presented here, for the first time in English, in a translation by Brian Stableford, are the complete prose poems of Éphraïm Mikhaël, a disciple of Mallarmé and an important member of the Symbolist Movement. Though he died when only twenty-three years old, of tuberculosis, Mikhaël made a significant contribution to the Movement. The works translated here only give a foretaste of the work the author might have gone on to do, but it is mature work, and its spectrum offers a reasonably comprehensive account of the author's literary ambitions and philosophical attitude-the latter enviably colored by the disease that, as he was all too well aware, was gradually killing him.

Originally written in 1877 and then reworked for inclusion in the 1880 Naturalist anthology Les Soirées de Médan, this novella tells the story of the daily life of a French conscript during the Franco-Prussian war-a life of tears, lice, and filth.

During his lifetime the eccentric Count Eric Stenbock published a single collection of short stories, Studies of Death. These seven tales, at once feverish, morbid, and touching, are a key work of English decadence and the Yellow Nineties. This disquieting collection, long out of print, is here presented for the first time in paperback.

The Dying Peasant, a masterpiece of Flemish literature, and the work by which the symbolist writer Karel van de Woestijne is most remembered today, tells the story of the peasant Nand, and his last hours, when his mind turns inward, to a world of memory in which he is visited by a succession of figures representing his five senses, reminding him of the joys of his modest existence.Originally published in 1918 and here made available in English for the first time in its unabridged form in a superb new translation by Paul Vincent, this novella, by one of Flanders' greatest poets, is a work of profound beauty and humanity.

Errant Vice, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the key compositions of the Decadent Movement. A blackly comic novel starring Count Wladimir Noronsoff, the last of an accursed branch of a Russian aristocratic family, this is arguably the most outrageous of Jean Lorrain's works, with a richness of perversity and a quasi-imperial craziness in which the Côte d'Azur is an arena where echoes of Byzantium resound.This is a novel of fascinating moral and artistic complexity which, with its horror and sadness, humor and tragedy, is the climax of the author's career.

Aiaigasa-1. (adverb) under one umbrella 2. (noun) a romantically shared umbrella.Here, under one umbrella, shared by author and illustrator, are poems, zuihitsu (essays) and illustrations from a three-week sojourn in Japan in the autumn of 2015.Covering over a dozen locations between Osaka in the south and Naruko in the north, this travelogue now and then crosses the older path of Basho, geographically, and the footsteps of the travellers awaken echoes of the past, both cultural and personal.Far from a guidebook, this is a bewilderment of detours and digressions, a celebration of the intersections of shared experience, and a time-steeped meditation on the meaning of a life's attachment to a place that is not home.

Presented here in English for the first time, in a bravura translation by Brian Stableford, are two highly unusual novels from one of the fin-de-siècle's most eccentric writers.The Demi-Sexes, originally published in 1897, was the first of Jane de La Vaudère's novels seriously to explore the territory of the conventionally unmentionable, which it does forthrightly, in its first chapter, when its heroine, Camille, asks a doctor, in secret, for "an operation."The Androgynes, first published in 1903, a tale of faithfulness and fickleness amidst the vicious rivalries of the literary and artistic worlds, presents a lush and decadent Paris, replete with cross-dressers, opium smoking, and a provocative miscellany of amour.Intensely interesting and intriguing, with their zestful mixture of tragic lamentation and ostentatious outrage, The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes remain captivatingly readable and are sure to be found daring even by today's standards.

Nikonor is an eccentric and scholarly snob, a mycomaniac who has just made it to the Château de la Charlanne where he spent his childhood in the company of his twin sister, Anastasie. After all these years, it is not quite clear what brings him back to la Charlanne-an isolated and somewhat derelict castle located in the heart of the French countryside-but he is keen to share various memories with the reader in order to 'set the record straight', while he delivers his opinions on literature, cheeses, and, especially, mushrooms.Winner of both a Prix André Dubreuil and a Prix Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco upon its original publication in France, The Beauty of the Death Cap is a darkly comic and sinister novel, a work that, page by page, becomes ever more disturbing, as we try to discover who Nikonor really is.