How It Is

Author	T.S. Eliot
ISBN	0571068944

The Four Quartets is a series of four poems by T.S. Eliot, published individually from 1936 to 1942, and in book form in 1943; it was considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work. Each of the quartets has five "movements" and each is titled by a place name -- BURNT NORTON (1936), EAST COKER (1940), THE...

Author	Laurence Sterne
ISBN	0141439777

No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and...

Author	Joris-Karl Huysmans
ISBN	0140447636

With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous...

Author	Joris-Karl Huysmans
ISBN	0486228371

La-bas (English Down There)--with its explicit account of child sex-murders and its detailed description of a black mass—may benefit from its transgressive reputation but also suffers from it too. Readers who come to it seeking thrills and horrors will be alternately bored and disappointed,...

Author	Thomas Bernhard
ISBN	1400077540

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.
One of Bernhard's most...

Author

Nathanael West

As described by Atkinson in the NY Times: "A scornful feature editor of a newspaper picks an ambitious young reporter to conduct the advice of the lovelorn column. Ambitious, opportunistic, 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' as the conductor of the column is inevitably dubbed, begins with contempt of the correspondents...

Author	Henri Alleg
ISBN	0803259603

Originally published in 1958, The Question is the book that opened the torture debate in France during Algeria’s war of independence and was the first book since the eighteenth century to be banned by the French government for political reasons. At the time of his arrest by French paratroopers during...