Mademoiselle de Maupin

Author	Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
ISBN	0192838679

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil,...

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0140443282

A little human sacrifice, a touch of cannibalism, some slaughter of both soldiers and civilians, one or two crucifixions, there you have it, the mercenaries revolt against Carthage in 240 B.C. Yes I am being facetious, a great amount in all these categories in fact occurred, people played rough then,...

Author	Honoré de Balzac
ISBN	0140442324

Why should anyone care about Esther, a prostitute from a young age, a harlot with powers over men? Why should anyone care about a spoiled feeble individual such as Lucien, the poet whose ambitions are to secure a noble title and live in luxury for the rest of his life? The same Lucien who, by the way, in Lost...

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	Lord Byron
ISBN	0140424520

Probably few subjects fitted Byron's particular talents better than Don Juan.

In this rambling, exuberant, conversational poem, the travels of Don Juan are used as a vehicle for some of the most lively and acute commentaries on human societies and behaviour in the language. The manner is...

Author

Comte de Lautréamont

Alternate version of this book.

‘It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity.’

So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70) at the beginning of this sensational Chants de Maldoror.

One...

Author	Émile Zola
ISBN	1414275897

Emile Zola's novel Le Rêve (1888) is a love idyll concerning a poor embroideress, Angelique, and the son of a wealthy aristocratic family, set against the backdrop of a sleepy cathedral town in northern France.

A far cry from the seething, teeming world evoked in Zola's best-known novels,...

Author	Antonin Artaud
ISBN	0971457808

Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud's most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus...