Book cover for Snuggly Tales of Femmes Fatales by Théophile Gautier and Maurice Renard

Snuggly Tales of Femmes Fatales

2022 Released
296 Pages
4-6 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Snuggly BooksISBN 9781645251002
"And me, what have I done? I had the age of their illusions and their desires made me young. Beautiful in their amour, I smiled at their dream and my smile protected them against death by smiling at them. Today, the number of years forgotten in my presence and the weight of their regret is overwhelming me, their awakening has aged me by a thousand years, and now I am condemned to live for a thousand years, hideous and sad, the life that each of them might have lived down here."

-Jean Lorrain, "Oriane Vanquished"


Gathered together in the present volume, edited and translated from the French by Brian Stableford, are seventeen tales of femmes fatales, many of which have never appeared in English before. From the pioneering "The Amorous Revenant" by Théophile Gautier, to Jules Lermina's horrific "The Titaness," this significant sampling of those seductively attractive females who lead men into problematic positions will be sure to appeal to connoisseurs of dark fairy tales, fin-de-siècle decadence, and those who simply revel in the frissons offered by this irresistible antiquarian subgenre.

Maurice Renard

Maurice Renard was born on February 28, 1875, in Ch lons-en-Champagne to parents whose names are not widely recorded in available biographical sources. Renard developed a reputation as a pioneering French writer of speculative and science-based fiction. His literary career gained momentum with the publication of Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu in 1908, a novel influenced by H.G. Wells that explored themes of transplant surgery, including grafts between humans, animals, and even machines. Renard s fascination with the philosophical boundaries of science continued in Le P ril Bleu (1910), which imagined invisible extraterrestrials studying humans like specimens. He went on to write Les Mains d'Orlac (1920), in which a pianist receives the hands of a murderer, blending horror with psychological tension. His works such as L'Homme Truqu and Le Singe explored artificial senses and synthetic life. Renard also tackled miniaturization in Un Homme chez les Microbes: Scherzo and toyed with temporal physics in Le Ma tre de la Lumi re. He often challenged popular scientific concepts with creative twists, offering early critiques of invisibility and cloning. His novels reflect a blend of imagination and inquiry into the ethics and consequences of science. He died in Rochefort-sur-Mer on November 18, 1939.

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