Rapid Tales
Jane de La Vaudère
Translated by Brian Stableford
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.
About the Author
Jane de La Vaudère was baptized Jeanne Scrive and was married to Camille Gaston Crapez, who began styling himself Crapez de La Vaudère after inheriting the Château de La Vaudère from his mother. Her prolific literary work is very various but she was assimilated to the Decadent Movement firstly because of two scandalously scabrous Parisian novels, Les Demi-Sexes (1897) and Les Androgynes (1903), and, more pertinently, because of a series of accounts of moeurs antiques, some of which—notably Le Mystère de Kama (1901) set new standards of excess.
About the Translator
Brian Stableford has been writing for fifty years. His fiction includes include eleven novels and seven short story collections in a series of “tales of the biotech revolution”; a series of metaphysical fantasies set in Paris in the 1840s, featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin, most recently Yesterday Never Dies (2012); and a series of supernatural mysteries set in an artist’s colony, most recently The Pool of Mnemosyne (2018). Recent novels independent of any series include Vampires of Atlantis (2016) and The Tangled Web of Time (2016). He also translates antique works from the French, with particular interests in the Symbolist and Decadent Movements, roman scientifique and the fantastique.
Paperback, 392 pages. Release date: April 18, 2023
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-124-8
Price: US$28.00
Hardcover, 394 pages. Limited edition of 100 copies
Release date: April 18, 2023
Price: US$39.00
Other books by Jane de La Vaudère :
Syta’s Harem and Pharaoh’s Lover
The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes
The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies
The Mystery of Kama and Brahma’s Courtesans
The Witch of Ecbatana and The Virgin of Israel
Three Flowers and the King of Siam’s Amazon