The Absinthe Underground

Moulin Rouge meets Holly Black in a thrilling sapphic friends-to-lovers romantasy! This lavish and decedent LGBTQ+ fantasy romance will leave fans of Divine Rivals and Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries utterly enchanted! “A romantic and thrilling story of ambition, magic, and peril.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review After running away from home, Sybil Clarion is eager to embrace all the freedom the Belle Époque city of Severon has to offer. Instead, she’s traded high-society soirées for empty pockets. At least she has Esme, the girl who offered Sybil a home, and if either of them dared, something more. While Esme would rather spend the night tinkering with her clocks and snuggling her cats, Sybil craves excitement and needs money. She plans to get both by stealing the rare posters that crop up around town. But when she’s caught selling a poster by none other than its subject, Maeve, the glamorous girl invites Sybil and Esme to The Absinthe Underground, the exclusive club she co-owns, and reveals herself to be a Green Faerie, trapped in this world. Maeve wants to hire thieves for a daring heist in Fae and is willing to pay enough that Sybil and Esme never have to worry about money again. It’s too good of an offer to pass up, even if Maeve’s tragic story doesn’t quite add up, and the secrets could jeopardize everything the girls have so carefully built. Jamie Pacton, author of The Vermilion Emporium, dazzles in this whimsical and daring romantic fantasy. Fans of Fae lore, slow-burn sapphic pining, and decadently magical worlds will find The Absinthe Underground as ensorcelling as a fairy delight.

Step into the exclusive world of ‘the green fairy’ in this astonishing true crime story about an eccentric con man who blew up the black market with counterfeit absinthe. Absinthe, a elixir made of alcohol and herbs, is a booming business. From France to Japan, new absinthe distilleries are opening every year, with global trade expected to reach $44.3 billion by 2026. Yet it is still an underground culture, associated with mystery, romance, and bohemian lifestyles, in keeping with its popularity among the writers, artists, and other ne’er-do-wells of nineteenth-century France. First produced in 1792, the spirit, known as “the green fairy,” was banned worldwide by 1914 before the bans were gradually overturned beginning in 2007. Enter a bon vivant who inveigles his way into the private Facebook groups where the modern absinthe demimonde converges and charms some of the best minds (and palates) in the beverage world into thinking that he was selling them precious vintage pre-ban bottles. How did he get away with it? The Absinthe Forger pieces together the forger's subterfuge and motivation. It shows how absinthe can transform a person — and even connect drinkers with a deeper, often hidden sense of self. It relates the romantic and illicit history of absinthe, from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France, and on to the spirit’s modern revival starting in the 2000s. Rail digs deep into the modern absinthe underground, whose members are still frantic to find the last remaining bottles of pre-ban absinthe, and he visits modern producers of the spirit, who have, in a generation, changed in status from daring-criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities. Ripe for a Netflix documentary, The Absinthe Forger is a compellingly bizarre crime drama that will make you never look at wormwood in the same way again.

An investigation into what thrills us, what terrifies us, and what would make us travel ten thousand miles and evade the local authorities, The Devil's Picnic is a delicious and compelling expedition into the heart of vice and desire. Taras Grescoe is the author of two books, one of which, Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec, was shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Award and was a national bestseller in Canada. His work appears in major publications all over the US, the UK and Canada. "Vivid and entertaining."-New York Times "[Grescoe] spends a year in seven countries, seeking out such delicacies as Epoisses cheese, which smells so bad it's said to have been banned from the Paris Metro; the author writes fondly that it makes 'Gorgonzola smell like Velveeta.'...He eats bulls' testicles in Madrid and visits an absinthe distillery in Switzerland. You feel hung over just reading the thing-guilty, implicated and strangely hungry."-Los Angeles Times Also available: HC ISBN: 1-58234-429-9 ISBN-13 978-1-58234-429-4 $24.95

Through Genevieve--a woman struggling with an idealistic vision of love--a door is opened into the lives of the characters through which Marie-Claire Blais came to the forefront of feminism in Canada. Night after night in a club called The Underground, Genevieve and her friends live out their loves and their tragedies apart from the day-to-day life of the city. Each glance, each embrace, and each ensuing encounter weaves a profound matrix of human isolation, with transcendence found in the healing power of love.

Absinthe produced a sense of euphoria, similar to the effect of cocaine and opium, but was addictive and caused a rapid loss of mental and physical faculties. Despite that, Picasso, Manet, Rimbaud and Wilde were among those devoted to the "green fairy, " and produced writings and art influenced by absinthe.