Amanit

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus

Translated by Brian Stableford

Amanit, is one of the most distinctive works that the highly distinctive Lucie Delarue-Mardrus ever produced, written in 1929, when the author was fifty-four years old, and her meteoric career as a “professional beauty” was far behind her.

Here presented in English for the first time, in a translation by Brian Stableford, the novel features the extremely striking, and extremely mysterious, Princess Antigone Antinides, a woman like no other, who, together with the other two principal characters, the scholar Charles-Étienne and the enigmatic Geneviève, engages on an Egyptological adventure of great artistry and sustained suspense.

Kaleidoscopic in nature, Amanit is a devil’s advocate of a book, which deliberately posits that, however unlikely it might be, true love must be possible, and asks the further question: if it were possible, what would it look like? And it is the hypothetical answer that the story-line provides that makes the story truly bizarre.

In addition to the main novel, the current volume also contains two earlier short stories, also previously untranslated, featuring other manifestations of Amanit, thus deepening the reader’s insight into the evolution of the principal novel.

About the Author
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) was born in Honfleur in Normandy, the youngest of the six daughters of an advocate. In 1900 she married the Orientalist Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1868-1949), a marriage which endured until 1913, but the union was confused from the outset by Lucie’s apparent preference for women as sexual partners. She was a member of Natalie Barney’s coterie of female poets and was rumored to have had affairs with more than one of them. A prolific author, she produced more than seventy books, including the collection of poetry Ferveur (1908) and the novels L’Acharnée (1910) and Amanit (1929).

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, 208 pages
Release date, September 8, 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-077-7
USA: $16.00