![]() ![]() Rodolfo Wilcock, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Whitman (whom he translated into French). The secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño and J. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating form as it comes into contact with this unparalleled imagination. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. ![]() Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, Schwob’s stories portray clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Twenty one of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest tales, translated to English for the first timeFirst published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the Golden Mask gathers 21 of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. ![]()
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