The Death of Balzac

Octave Mirbeau

Translated by Brian Stableford

Here, presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of Octave Mirbeau’ s darkest works: a fictionalized account of the death of the giant of French letters, Honoré de Balzac.

Among his journalistic endeavors, Mirbeau contributed a large number of short stories to the newspapers in the fin-de-siècle period, and he honed his skill in that kind of work to near-perfection. Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be “true,” and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction, and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ambiguous kind, however, are quite as brazen or as seductively persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up The Death of Balzac, which, seen purely as a literary exercise, is a masterpiece of sorts, in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration.

It is a gripping and affectively powerful story, artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.

About the Author
Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) was a prolific French journalist, novelist and playwright, who is nowadays deemed to have been a significant member of the Decadent Movement, largely because of his classic phantasmagoric fantasy Torture Garden (1899). Among his other novels of note are Abbé Jules (1888) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900).

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, 92 pages. Release date, April 16, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-943813-56-8
Price: US$12.00