Elsewhere and Other Stories

Gabriel-Albert Aurier, though primarily remembered nowadays as an art critic, especially as a vociferous early advocate of the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, was also an ardent and very active member of the Symbolist Movement during the years immediately prior to his premature death from typhus. Along with a number of short stories, the present volume contains his posthumously published novella Elsewhere, an important work of modernist prose fiction, determinedly original in its narrative method, casually self-referential while deliberately avoiding explanation of the peculiar symbolism of its violent climax. With its caustic admixture of the earnest and the satirical in its defiant championship of the poetic in opposition to the assaults of positivistic science, it is a significant precursor of surrealism; and, although it has affinities, unsurprisingly, with other near-contemporary radical Symbolist texts, it is very much one of a kind, and has lost none of its trenchancy with the passage of time.