Double Heart
Marcel Schwob
Translated by Brian Stableford
Double Heart, Marcel Schwob’s first collection of short stories, here presented in English for the first time, in an expert translation by Brian Stableford, was originally published in 1891, all of the stories in it having previously appeared in the daily newspaper L’Écho de Paris while the author was part of a “stable” of writers attached to the newspaper, commissioned to supply stories at weekly or fortnightly intervals.
Considered superficially, the project of writing a short story once a fortnight, or even once a week, does not seem particularly daunting, but the reality was that few were able to keep up such a pace while maintaining diversity and originality. During the years when he was penning the stories assembled in Coeur double, Schwob was, however, one of those aristocrats, and the collection is remarkably heterogeneous, both thematically and in terms of its narrative strategies, perhaps more so than any other issued in the nineteenth century, and its variety offers an interesting example of disciplined randomness: not only a relentless quest for difference but a relentless quest for different kinds of difference.
Marcel Schwob was a genius, albeit one only appreciated by a limited cognoscenti, and the present book, with its idiosyncratic brand of black comedy, and its mastery of abbreviation and understatement, is a long overdue addition to the work of this wonderful author available in English.
About the Author
Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was sent to Paris in 1881 to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he met the future writers Léon Daudet and Paul Claudel; he lived with his uncle, the novelist Léon Cahun. He became a professional journalist in 1888, working on both L’Événement and L’Écho de Paris. His great admiration for Edgar Poe is very obvious in his story collections Coeur double (Ollendorf 1891) and Le Roi au masque d’or (1892), translations from which can be found in the sampler The King in the Golden Mask (Carcanet, 1985). Other works exhibiting a strong Symbolist influence include the quasi-autobiographical Le Livre de Monelle (1894) and a book of fictitious biographies, Vies imaginaires (1896), but his health deteriorated catastrophically as a result of an undiagnosable chronic condition, which eventually killed him.
About the Translator
Brian Stableford has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for fifty years. His fiction includes a series of “tales of the biotech revolution” and a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin. He has previously translated for Snuggly Books a number of titles, including The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies by Jean Lorrain, and The Unknown Collaborator and Other Legendary Tales by Victor Joly.
Paperback, 290 pages
Release Date: December 8, 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-055-5
Price: $19.00
Hardcover, 292 pages. Limited edition to 100 copies
Release Date: December 8, 2020
Price: $37.00.