A neurasthenic aristocrat turns his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreats to an isolated country villa. Here he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems and perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments.

Follows Durtal, a shy, censorious man, who is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais. Bored by the vulgarity of everyday life, he seeks spiritual solace by immersing himself in another age. But when he meets the exquisitely evil Madame Chantelouve, he is drawn into the twilight world of black magic and erotic devilry in fin-de-siecle Paris.

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were .

This work offers a unified field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty. From Emily Dickinson and Medusa to Madonna, it makes a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature.

In print since 1948, this is a single-volume collection of Oscar Wilde's texts. It contains his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays and letters. Illustrated with many photographs.

Contains all the Aubrey Beardsley drawings and is the English translation undertaken by Lord Alfred Douglas of Wilde's most brilliant tale of passion, which was originally written in French to avoid (unsuccessfully) Victorian censorship. Salome is a simple tale of complex passion. Wilde's heroine bears no resemblance to her biblical origin. His Salome is no mere instrument of Herodias, but a ...

An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Art for Art's Sake - challenging aesthetic standards & shocking the bourgeosie.

Perversity, Despair and Collapse. Horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never been translated into English before. Translated by Margo Rosen and Grigory Dashewski.

This is a new translation after half a century of Huysmans' earliest masterpiece. It includes the short story, 'The Retreat of Monsieur Bougran', translated for the first time into English. 'With the Flow' describes the minutiae of misery and boredom in the day in the life of a man who - for a moment - refuses to go with the flow.

A Jewish classic of great interest to anyone interested in the Kabbala or mysticism.

This new Satyricon features not only a lively, new, annotated translation of the text, but also fresh, and accessible commentaries that discuss Petronius' masterpiece in terms of such topics as the identity of Petronius, the transmission of his manuscript, literary influences on the Satyricon, and the distinctive literary form of this work -- as well as such hallmarks of Roman life as oratory, ...

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.

Vermilion Sands - populated only by forgotten movie queens, solitary impresarios, beachcombers and malignant obsessions - is a fully-automated desert resort languishing in uneasy decay: a place where psychosensitive houses are driven to murder by their owners' neuroses, and love palls before evil.