Born, raised, and intellectually and culturally formed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the 1800's, Donald Sidney-Fryer came to the Golden State when he turned twenty-one. During 1956 through 1960 and the summer of 1964, he studied Theatre Arts, French, and Spanish at U.C.L.A., and received his B.A. in French language and literature in September of 1964. His discovery of the prose fictions and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith led to Sidney-Fryer's investigation of that group of poets and fictioneers to which Smith belonged, now known (thanks to Sidney-Fryer) as the California Romantics. This fantastic pride of scriveners includes Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Nora May French, and others. In the five decades since 1961, the year of Smith's death, Sidney-Fryer has written at length on these writers, their lives, and their over-all achievements, as well as editing significant collections of their writings, when otherwise they remained almost totally neglected and unheralded. Apart from the two dozen books and booklets he has compiled, written, and/or edited, Sidney-Fryer has done more than pioneer in scholarship concerning Ashton Smith and his fellow poets. Summoned by his first and extended reading of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene to his own vocation as a poet (during the winter and spring of 1961), Sidney- Fryer has in particular continued the traditions of the California Romantics in an innovative and radical manner. He has also given innumerable recitals not just of his own works but of those by his chosen predecessors, including Spenser along with many others. This volume gathers together for the first time the essays and reviews of this pioneer of phantastick literature, mostly long out of print and reprinted here for the first time.

Nora May French (1881-1907) is an enigmatic and ethereal figure in American poetry and in the poetry of California. Born in Aurora, New York, she came to Los Angeles with her family when she was a little girl, and in the course of her brief and tragic life she lived and wrote more intensely than many who live a full span of years. Her poetry possesses its own kind of cosmic consciousness, aligning it with the work of Clark Ashton Smith and her friend George Sterling. Its delicacy and pathos render it an imperishable monument to the throbbing emotions and aesthetic sensitivity of the woman who, although beloved by all in Sterling's Bohemian circle, suffered keenly from her own love affairs and committed suicide in November 1907. Now, more than a hundred years after her passing, her poems have been gathered in this volume for the first time. The book includes an extensive biographical and critical introduction by Donald Sidney-Fryer, tributes to French by her contemporaries and by later admirers, and a selection of reviews. Nora May French published no books in her lifetime, but her poems were assembled in 1910 by George Sterling and others. That volume, however, was incomplete, and many fugitive poems have been added by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette, two of the leading authorities on California poetry and the poetry of fantasy and terror.

These poems are of an unearthly beauty. They celebrate love, beauty, and humanity; and yet throughout many of them is a consciousness of impending apocalypse. The imagery, lush, exotic, full of colors and magic names, is a welcome relief from the sterile, prosaic poetry of today. If you enjoy tripping on language, this book is for you. Whether the poems really are from the Atlantean or whether they are the creations of poet Sidney-Fryer, they deserve to be read and experienced. -- Charles K. Wolfe Sidney-Fryer is, in a very strong sense, a traditionalist; his creations, superlatively original as they are, yet give us a powerful feeling of continuity with our own past and culture; they make us see ... the ideals that moved us when we were less "secure" and more human: adventure, love of life, and above all, the intricate beauty of a world long vanished - yet not vanished, if only we had eyes to see. -- Richard L. Tierney Sidney-Fryer has created, in his fictional Atlantis, an entire civilization and a body of absorbing literature. The book should appeal to lovers of poetry, to devotees of science fiction, and to those who admire writers who can fashion a realistic world from the materials of mythology and speculation. -- Earl J. Dias Mr. Fryer is a profound student of Clark Ashton Smith, and the influence shows, but he is very much his own poet, and he structures and plays with a surety and deftness which is remarkable. -- Gahan Wilson A delightful book of verse - purportedly fragments of poetry from the lost Empire of Atlantis - that is very much in the tradition of Spenser's Faerie Queene. A work that reflects a glittering imagination and no mean talent. -- James Gorski

Gaspard de la Nuit (originally published in 1842) combines the haunting Gothic imagery of ETA Hoffman with the colorful romantic verve of Victor Hugo. In it, you will meet Scarbo the vampire dwarf, Ondine, the faerie princess of the waters, and an unforgettable assortment of lepers, alchemists, beggars, swordsmen and ghosts. Gaspard de la Nuit inspired Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmi, the Surrealist Movement and composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote a suite of virtuoso piano pieces patterned after it. This new edition has been entirely retranslated by renowned poet and literary historian Donald Sidney-Fryer, the author of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean who has edited four collections of prose and poetry by Clark Ashton Smith. In his extensive introduction and afterword, Sidney-Fryer retraces the steps in Bertrand's life, casts a new light on his works and follows the elusive Gaspard from the Three Kings of Bethlehem to Casper the Friendly Ghost. This collection features a foreword by T.E.D. Klein and is illustrated by drawings from Bertand himself.