The fifteen stories of Darkscapes, Anne-Sylvie Salzman’s new collection in English, superbly translated from the French by William Charlton, explore the horror in life, the beauty in strangeness. Despite the diverse settings of Salzman’s stories, their inhabitants share an affinity with the unusual, the dislocated and the other.
Hikers in the Scottish Highlands, a working-girl in Tokyo, boy scouts on a country adventure, drifting students, prowling beasts, makers of glass eyes, inhabit the farthest reaches of the imagination—be it the dying gleam of a lingering dusk, cannibalism in a Parisian park, or the tremor of a snipe’s feathers. Salzman/Charlton’s prose, precise and subtle, leads readers willingly into the heart of darkness.
Contains: Lost Girls: ‘Child of Evil Stars’, ‘Fox into Lady’, ‘The Old Towpath’, ‘The Opening’, ‘Meannanaich’. Crucifixions: ‘Passing Forms’, ‘Under the Lighthouse’, ‘Pan’s Children’, ‘Brunel’s Invention’, ‘Shioge’. The Story of Margaret: ‘What the Eye Remembers’, ‘The Hand that Sees’. Wildlife: ‘Hilda’, ‘Lamont’, ‘Feral’. Bibliography. Acknowledgements.
Anne-Sylvie Salzman (aka Anne-Sylvie Homassel) is a Paris-based writer and translator. She co-directs Le Visage vert, a literary magazine and small press devoted to supernatural fiction. She is the author of Sommeil (José Corti), Au bord d’un lent fleuve noir (Joëlle Losfeld) and Lamont (Le Visage vert). Amongst other novels and collections, she translated Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, Lord Dunsany’s The Sword of Welleran, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados and Arthur Machen’s Three Impostors—and some of W.S. Graham’s poetry, feats she is inanely proud of. She is currently working on a science-fiction novel.
Darkscapes is a sewn hardback book of 193 pages with decorated boards, silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands, and d/w.
ISBN 978-1-905784-57-8
Limited to 300 copies.
