Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
1838–1889
Biography
Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was a French writer of the symbolist generation and one of the more unusual figures in nineteenth-century French letters. He was born in 1838 at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, into a family with aristocratic claims. His family knew him as Mathias and his friends as Villiers, and on some of his printed books he used the name Auguste. He spent most of his adult life in Paris, writing for the stage, for magazines and for publishers, and he was often short of money.
His reputation rests on a handful of striking books. Contes cruels, published in 1883, is a collection of short stories that are cruel in a deliberately ironic way and often take aim at the bourgeois world. L'Ève future (1886) is a science-fiction novel in which Thomas Edison appears as an inventor who builds a lifelike female android to satisfy a lover disappointed by a real woman. His drama Axël, which prefigured symbolist theatre, appeared in book form the year after his death in 1889. Its influence came later than the man himself, and he is remembered now as a precursor of several movements.
Two of his books are in this library: the short stories of Contes cruels and the novel L'Ève future. Both show him at his most inventive and most mocking. L'Ève future is often counted among the early novels about artificial humans, and the stories show his taste for the grotesque and the unsettling. They are a good starting point for readers who know him mainly as a name in literary histories.
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Books
Contes cruels
by Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Contes cruels (Cruel Tales) is a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier. The title was taken…
Summary from Wikipedia: Contes cruels (CC BY-SA 4.0)L'Ève future
by Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
The Future Eve is a symbolist science fiction novel by the French author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Begun in 1878 and originally published in 1880 as L'Ève nouvelle, the novel is known for popularizing the term "Android". This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Future Eve (CC BY-SA 4.0)