Showing 305–320 of 1000 resultsSorted by popularity
Catulle Mendès (1841-1909) wrote more tales featuring fays than any other French writer–nearly twice as many as Madame d’Aulnoy. However, by the 1880s, the genre had been largely misremembered and remained unread for a hundred years. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Mendès elected to draw his own imaginative raw materials from Shakespeare rather from than…
This volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles more than eighty contes, fables and apologues employing supernatural motifs The light-hearted flippancy of the majority of the stories collected here has its own heroic dimension in blithely sacrificing the…
The present volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles 23 tales of the fantastique dealing with anomalous events and altered states of consciousness that might or might not have supernatural causes. Other writers such as Marcel Schwob have…
The Incredible Adventure (1902) by Louis Forest is about the inventor of a material vehicle capable of carrying passengers anywhere in the universe, and devotes considerable attention to hypothetical physical and psychological effects of the experience of approaching and transcending the velocity of light. The Triumph of Humankind (1911) by Francois Leonard sees the Earth…
In The Man Who Could Read Minds (1928), Jean Pilgrim manufactures strange spectacles that permit the observation of what is happening in the minds of others. Paul Gsell’s novel begins as a Voltairean satire, but soon changes both tone and direction as it progresses from relatively amiable exploration of the hypocrisies of art and science…
Zigomar is a character dreamed up by Léon Sazie in 1909, two years before the now much more celebrated Fantômas. An evil, nefarious character, a criminal genius, Zigomar was so popular in his time that his picture could be found on bags of bread, pipes and matchboxes. Masked, hooded, or in disguise, Zigomar constantly bedevils…
Galaor de Montbars, Musketeer of French King Louis XIII, is forced to flee France because of the schemes of the sinister Cardinal de Richelieu. Later, he is transported far, far into the past to Mû, the legendary fifth planet, the destruction of which produced the Asteroid Belt. On this world of gold, steeped in legends,…
During the Reign of French King Charles VI, a fierce struggle for power develops between the king’s brother, Louis d’Orléans, and his cousin, Jean de Bourgogne. When the latter instigates the murder of the former in 1407, the conflict degenerates into a civil war between Burgundians and Armagnacs. In the midst of this blood-drenched background,…
Meet the oddest superheroes ever – Baron Sarcasm, a Scrooge-like, wealthy, cantankerous elderly man living in a castle somewhere in the French countryside; his niece, the pretty, spunky Mademoiselle Mademoiselle, also a brilliant inventor, her son Gizmo, and their cousin, a gentle giant nicknamed Captain Camembert. Together, they built a rocket in their backyard shed…
The TWILIGHT PEOPLE, hidden for centuries, are awakening, thirsty for their ancient rituals of blood, reaady to strike in the City of Angels in this new millennium… But then comes the one able to fight the forces of darkness… Returning to Los Angeles to investigate the death of his father and the disappearance of his…
William’s Angel (1838) is based on the story of William FitzOsbert, who led a popular uprising by the citizens of London in the spring of 1196, and was executed. S. Henry Berthoud goes on to weave a semi-mythical retelling of this incident, that includes the characters of Robin Hood and Richard the Lionheart. This book…
The present volume contains De Lautrec’s short novel The Sacred Fire (1904), and a selection from short prose poems (1898). The latter benefit from being juxtaposed with the former because one of the episodes of the novel reveals the circumstances in which they were composed, with not only explains their surreal nature but allows them…
Young knight Konrad de Felseneck, last descendant of a noble line, discovers that a curse hangs over his family: women are the curse of the Felseneck since the betrayal of his ancestor during the first crusade. Then he falls into the hands of the beautiful and cruel Gertrude, a young widow whose previous husbands have…
André Couvreur’s Human Seed, (1903) was one of the most shocking works of its era, one that attempted more fervently than any other to push back the boundaries of the conventionally-unmentionable, such as contraception, abortion and eugenics, illustrated through the lives of the eighteen children of the Grignon family, afflicted by the ongoing social disasters…
The novel is set in the 1480s, during the war in which the French annexed Bretagne. At the Benedictine Abbey in Paimpol, a scholarly monk named Ollivier, reputed to have practiced necromancy, is buried under the watchful eyes of two Dominican heresy hunters, the burial only attended by his fellow scholar Brother Primael, who believes…
1900: Gouroull, Victor Frankenstein’s lethal creation, wanders the snowy steppes in the heart of frozen Siberia and receives an offer he cannot refuse. If he opens a path for the ancient, alien beings known as the Outer Gods, their servant will provide him a perfect mate. Gouroull must defeat demons, crazed collectors, inhuman monsters, an…
