The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-siecle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendes, Rachilde, Jean Moreas, Octave Mirbeau, Josephin Peladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-siecle France.

    Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire's personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.

    As an individual, Daumal was seen by those who knew him as a modern proto-saint with a blazing intellect and wit; as a writer, he was the first to forge a mystical link between classical Hindu poetics and the revolutionary views of Gurdjieff, synthesized in surrealist style.Originally published in French, this revised English edition shows why many feel that Daumal's literary group, Le Grand Jeu was a brief, but more authentic voice of the French avant-garde circa 1930 than the more established Surrealist movement. While still in his teens, he placed himself at the crossroads of powerful converging influences: Hinduism, Surrealism, Marxism, Freudianism, and parapsychology, but the strongest influence was the fiery internal cauldron of his own lifelong spiritual struggle. At sixteen, Daumal began to teach himself Sanskrit and to decipher the essence of Hindu philosophy and poetics, but it was the teaching of Gurdjieff that truly changed his life, giving him an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the human being and of the entire cosmos.Rosenblatt traces all these influences and experiences as they reveal the depths of Daumal's being, and as they surface in his poetry, Le Contre-ciel, and in his two short novels, A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue. Today, Daumal's personal vision of the Infinite and the story of his quest are more timely and essential than ever.