The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day, condemned to death, and thrown into a cell to await the guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians.But what if the militant is a “pied-noir”? What if his lover was a member of the French Resistance? What happens to a “European” who chooses the side of anti-colonialism?By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as “vibrantly lyrical and somber” and by the journal La Croix as a “masterpiece”.

    In an environment dominated by the omnipresence of animals, five generations endure the cataclysm of war, economic disasters, and the emergence of a brutal industrialism reflecting an ancestral tendency to violence. Only the enchanted realm of childhood – that of Éléonore, the matriarch, and that of Jérôme, the last in the lineage – and the innate freedom of the animals offer any respite from the visible barbarity of humanity. Written in shifting prose that reflects the passage of time, Animalia is a powerful novel about man’s desire to conquer nature and the transmission of violence from one generation to the next. ‘Animalia is a book about sex and violence, but it has unusual sobriety, and a story with a deep pull. The way it senses the natural world, in seed, vein, hair, grain, pore, bud, f luid, is like nothing I’ve read.’ – Daisy Hildyard, author of The Second Body

    Perhaps, given the variety of human behavior, it was not possible for him actually to invent perversities that no one actually practiced, or were even tempted to practice, but what is certain is that no one ever examined the anatomy of eroticism, including its wilder extremes, with a greater analytical fervor.In this, the second collection of short stories by Jean Lorrain to be made available in English, exquisitely translated by Brian Stableford, psychological studies of amorous perversity are presented together with mock-folktales, giving further evidence of the amazing inventiveness and imagination of one of the key figures of the Decadent Movement.

    S. Kline Illustrated with photography from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rimbaud’s poetry developed and extended the symbolist legacy of Baudelaire, who with apolitical intensity had responded to the challenge of modernity in verse embodying a new and darker vision. Rimbaud in his early verse expresses a lyrical and sensuous relationship with his subject matter, using conventional verse forms as Baudelaire had, to explore unconventional, modernist patterns of thought and behaviour. While seemingly adolescent in some respects, the poetry is also astoundingly mature, both as poetry and in exposing his underlying discontent with French provincial life and culture.In his later work, Rimbaud used prose as a poetic medium to express a mounting disgust with conventional existence and the deadened spiritual state of nineteenth-century Europe, in an extremist, semi-incantatory mode of literature, aimed at deranging the senses while provoking the intellect. It is a form of writing that strongly influenced the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which further challenged common sense and extolled the dislocation of perception.The energy that produced the poetry was then directed elsewhere. Through disgust with his previous existence and the artificiality of literature, through an inability perhaps to take the content of his poetry any further creatively, Rimbaud abandoned his writing, in symbolic renunciation, and effectively submerged himself in the practical world of trade and in alien cultures, an inner move towards the greater immediacy and emotional simplicity of those cultures paralleled in the arts by Baudelaire earlier and Gauguin later. Published by Poetry in Translation.

    Death to Bourgeois Society tells the story of four young anarchists who were guillotined in France in the 1890s. The volume focuses on the main avatars of this movement and contains key first-person narratives of the events, from Ravachol’s forbidden speech and his account of his life, to Emile Henry’s questioning at his trial and his programmatic letter to the director of the prison in which he was held, to Auguste Vaillant’s confrontation with the investigators immediately after tossing his bomb, and Santo Caserio’s description of the assassination and his defense at his trial. In a time of cynicism and political decay for many, they represented a purity lacking in society, and their actions when they were captured, their forthrightness, their defiance up to the guillotine only added to their luster.