comte de Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam 2 hr 52 min read

Strange and unsettling stories from a master of the cruel and the ironic, an enchanted Pacific island, thunder-mimicking beasts, and darker wonders.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1888 collection ('Uncommon Stories') gathers his acid, ironic tales of the fantastic and the macabre. Elegant, mordant, singular French fiction. Read it for the strange and cutting imagination of a great Symbolist, where wonder is always laced with cruelty.

In its time

Published in 1888, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

2 hr 52 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).