Mad scientists, parrots from Atlantis, witches, madmen, monsters, korrigans, demons, magical paintings and a water sprite trapped in a mirror are but a few of the amazing characters featured in this collection of 45 stories aptly entitled The Crazy Corner which maps out the frontier between madness and nightmare. Of all the late 19th century writers of contes cruels, Jean Richepin (1849-1926) was the cruelest when it came to the treatment of his characters, not so much in the nasty fates to which they were often delivered -- which are typical of the entire genre -- but in the merciless way in which he describes and characterizes them.

The Wing, A Romance of the New Age (1911) is the story of the alerion, a flying machine capable of neutralizing gravity by harnessing Earth's telluric currents, powered by atomic disintegration and controlled by radio signals; but even more, it is the story of its inventors, their lives and loves, and the tragedies that bind them. Jean Richepin was a member of the French Academy, and the author of several notable collections of fantastic stories. The Wing is a significant text in the history of French scientific romance, being one of the few literary responses to the uniquely exciting combination of the simultaneous development of the wireless, radioactivity and aviation, which suggested the dawn of a "new age."