From April 1897 until April 1903, Jane de La Vaudère (1857-1908) published in the Parisian newspapers La Presse and La Lanterne a series of over one hundred vignettes, mostly under the heading Contes Rapides. These brief stories, of beauty, horror, humor, love, and cruelty, carry strategies of narrative minimalism to a new level, and show the work of a masterful female author who was able to polish gems of decadence to sparkling perfection in the highly misogynistic environment of fin-de-siècle journalism dominated by her male counterparts.

This collection, assembled and translated into English by Brian Stableford, offers the first opportunity that anyone has ever had to read the series of rapid tales as a series and to asses it as a collage; as a bird's eye view of contemporary Parisian society it is highly selective and idiosyncratic, but that only serves to make it more interesting, and as a pioneering adventure in narrative minimalization it offers a significant exemplar to modern writers' workshops.