Böcker av Jane de la Vaudère

From April 1897 until April 1903, Jane de La Vaudère (1857-1908) published in the Parisian newspapers La Presse and La Lanterne a series of over one hundred vignettes, mostly under the heading Contes Rapides. These brief stories, of beauty, horror, humor, love, and cruelty, carry strategies of narrative minimalism to a new level, and show the work of a masterful female author who was able to polish gems of decadence to sparkling perfection in the highly misogynistic environment of fin-de-siècle journalism dominated by her male counterparts. This collection, assembled and translated into English by Brian Stableford, offers the first opportunity that anyone has ever had to read the series of rapid tales as a series and to asses it as a collage; as a bird's eye view of contemporary Parisian society it is highly selective and idiosyncratic, but that only serves to make it more interesting, and as a pioneering adventure in narrative minimalization it offers a significant exemplar to modern writers' workshops.

Exceedingly rare, even in the original French, and here translated for the first time into English by Brian Stableford, The Priestesses of Mylitta, first published in 1907, is Jane de La Vaudère's Babylon-set novel of decadence and amour. Revolving around the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author's last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.There is nothing half-hearted about The Priestesses of Mylitta, and no sign that La Vaudère was not as intensely emotionally involved with the project as she generally seemed to be; and the book, doused as it is with homicidal horrors and permeated with the incense of love, will surely delight all fans of her wonderful creations.

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.