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Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (1664-1734), a relative of the better-known Charles Perrault, was among the most important creators of the fairy tales genre. This ground-breaking collection gathers four stories originally published in 1696, a year before Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose, the classic The Dark Tower and the Luminous Days published in 1705, as well…
Penelope’s Secret (1922) picks up where Homer’s Odyssey ends, after the slaying of Penelope’s suitors and the discovery that her stubborn virtue was somewhat exaggerated, which causes Ulysses to seek advice from Minerva, Menelaus and his old tutor, the centaur Chiron. Plato in Search of Amour (1926) described the manner in which Plato, emerging from…
In The Mysterious Hermit of the Tomb (1816), the evil Arembert consigns his father to a dark dungeon, and has his brother assassinated in order to get his hands on the vast family estate of Saint-Felix. But unbeknownst to him, his brother has survived and returns in the guise of a strange Hermit, intent on…
X. B. Saintine (1978-1865) was a prolific dramatist who collaborated in more than 200 plays with Eugène Scribe and a noted figure of the Romantic Movement. The Second Life (1864) was Saintine’s swan song. This collection of fictitious dreams, hallucinations and metaphysical fantasies examine the nature of dreaming from a viewpoint infused by contemporary psychological…
X. B. Saintine (1978-1865) was a prolific dramatist who collaborated in more than 200 plays with Eugène Scribe and a noted figure of the Romantic Movement. Jonathan the Visionary (1823) is a collection of fantasy tales told by a mysterious immortal called Jonathan (who is only featured as an active narrator in a few of…
Pan’s Flute (1897), Etruscan Amour (1898) and Setne’s Women (1903) are three bold and lurid mythological fantasies dealing with erotic obsessions and ancient civilizations. J-H. Rosny Aîné is the second most important figure in modern French science fiction after Jules Verne. Rosny, who was a member of the distinguished Goncourt literary academy, was also the…
In March 1913, a nuclear rocket-powered spaceship leaves France to explore the planets of the Solar System. On board are the intrepid Marquis de Valsorres, the eminent Dr. Portier, the beautiful Zabeth and their loyal companion, Thomas. After a long stay on an utopian-like Mars, they reach the prehistoric world of Saturn. But in the…
The Iron Man is a fascinating cross-section of the works of Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814), a unique writer whose originality and enterprise has never yet been given the full credit that it deserves. From an early contribution to the development of the literary vampire to a pair of revealing philosophical spectacles, from a world that seems…
A collection of fairy tales bearing the signature Mademoiselle de *** was originally printed in Paris in two volumes in July 1697, and reissued in 1707, this time being attributed to Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force (1650-1724). Of all the pioneering writers of contes de fées, Mademoiselle de La Force is perhaps the one who…
Kristin Arroyo is a former Marine who served in Iraq. In the personal effects of her late grandfather – a once famous photographer – she discovers several unpublished photos of Marilyn Monroe. With the help of a friend, she decides to put on an exhibition to honor her grandfather; unfortunately, nothing goes as planned, as…
Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat (1670-1716) was one of the leading authors of tales of enchantments crafted in the literary salons peripheral to the court of Louis XIV in the 1690s which ultimately gave birth to a large sector of modern fantasy fiction. The Comtesse’s earlier stories are set in the time of the…
Edmond Haraucourt’s Dieudonat (1906, exp. 1912) fits in the rich French tradition of the contes merveilleux by endowing its eponymous hero at birth with the supernatural ability to produce miracles. Upon adulthood, Prince Dieudonat is forced to leave his kingdom and embarks on a quixotic, picaresque, and ultimately tragic, journey. Dieudonat is a work of…
In The Murdered City (1925), Blasius, an unknown and mocked scholar, manages to create a philosopher’s stone which transforms everything it touches into gold. This diabolical man acquires an island, gathers other unfortunate people, builds a fantastic city and reigns over it. The Murdered City has affinities with accounts of island utopias gone wrong and…
The story’s representation of marriage as a matter of innocent young women falling into the brutal hands of disgusting Ogres who abuse them is only par for the course, but what is unusual is the conclusion, in which the bold Prince, eager to do battle against the monsters guarding the cave where his beloved princess…
Journey to the Isles of Atlantis is the sixteenth volume in a series of anthologies translating antique items of French roman scientifique. Included in this collection are Fututistic Paris in 5839 (1822), a story for which the editor was fined a thousand francs and sentenced to three months in prison; The Clockmaker of Nuremberg (1882)…
The stories collected in Victor-Emile Michelet’s Superhuman Tales (1900) reveal his determined and constant ambition to push various envelopes in horror, fantasy and supernatural, which gives them a unique, particular edge. Michelet makes considerable efforts to distance his work from the conventional formulae. His tales draw energy and charm from the earnest esotericism of their…
