"Take one inventive genius indebted to the friend who saved his life; add an English aristocrat hopelessly consumed with a selfish and spiritually bankrupt woman; stir together with a Faustian pact to create the perfect woman--and voilà! Tomorrow's Eve is served. Robert Martin Adams's graceful translation is the first to bring to English readers this captivating fable of a Thomas Edison-like inventor and his creation, the radiant and tragic android Hadaly. Adams's introduction sketches the uncompromising idealism of the proud but penurious aristocrat Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a friend and admired colleague of Charles Baudelaire, Stèphane Mallarmé, and Richard Wagner. Villiers dazzles us with a gallery of electronic wonders while unsettling us with the implications of his (and our) increasingly mechanized and mechanical society. A witty and acerbic tale in which human nature, spiritual values, and scientific possibilities collide, Tomorrow's Eve retains an enduring freshness and edge." --Descripción del editor.

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Here, presented in English in a long-belated translation by Brian Stableford, is Isis, the first novel of the acclaimed author of Contes cruels, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Deserving to be reckoned as one of the foundation-stones of Decadent prose fiction, redolent with echoes of Byron and Poe, reconfigured in the Baudelairean manner, and flamboyant with Gautieresque elements, this book is a tour de force of extravagant implication and esthetic dexterity: a work of peculiar genius. In its vaulting ambitions, its quirky mannerisms, its philosophical posturing and its lush descriptions, Isis is certainly a tale given to excess, but that excess is the essence of the endeavor, the wand of its enchantment.

Villiers De L'isle Adam was one of the greatest symbolist writers of the 19th century. His works, in the Romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror. Originally published in 1886, 'The Future Eve' is a stunning work, noted for popularizing the term 'android'. Many of the horror stories of monsters and ghouls, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889), though best known for his contes cruels and his proto science fiction novel L'Ève future, began his career with two volumes of verse, Deux essais de poésie (1858) and Premières poésies (1859), the contents of which are here presented in their entirety as Complete Early Poetry, translated for the first time into English, by Richard Robinson. Under the spell of Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, the young author produced these early exemplars of Decadent verse, which are filled with exoticism, nocturnal fantasies, and mystery. Complete Early Poetry offers further insight into one of the most interesting and eccentric of the French Symbolists.