Self-discovery in a convent leads her to her confessor, Father Dirrag, and she is soon launched upon the path of reason that convinces her that passion and love of the Deity are equal gifts of God. With additional mentors, Therese learns that sensations are but a part of temperament, as natural as hunger and thirst, and all may be satisfied as long as it does not harm others.

    Set in a sultan's court in the Congo, the novel begins with Mangogul (the Sultan) suffering from acute boredom, only to be rescued by a genie offering the potentate a magic ring that, when pointed at women, causes their genitals, or 'jewels,' to speak. The resulting story, delightful in its wit and satire, was so openly irreverent and critical of the French Court at Versailles—with the Sultan as Louis XV and his favorite as Mme de Pompadour—that it caused Diderot some egregious trouble with the Parisian authorities. But "The Indiscreet Jewels" is more than just a political roman a clef. The Sultan's 'scientific method' reveals an allegory of the female body. What the 'jewels' say is at once a parody and supreme example of the French Enlightenment's urge to seek knowledge above and beyond the hypocrisies, inhibitions, and limitations of everyday life.

    it was the first major Persian romance, written between 1050 and 1055 in rhyming couplets. This remarkable work has now been superbly translated into heroic couplets (the closest metrical equivalent of the Persian) by the poet and scholar Dick Davis.

    In prose of great poetic beauty, which the author translated from his original French text Mal vu mal dit in 1982, Beckett returns to the imagery of the Old and New Testaments to speculate on the great questions of human existence. One of the great writers of the 20th century, Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969. He is remembered primarily as a novelist and playwright, producing Waiting for Godot and the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, though he was also a poet and, when he chose to be, a discerning critic of great originality. Beckett continues to exert a powerful influence on other writers and interest in his work has grown since his death in 1989.

    1070 for the queen of Kashmir. Unlike those more familiar classics, this work contains no hidden moral lessons. Instead, it is an uninhibited and bawdy celebration of earthly life. This edition includes ten of the original eighteen books.

    Niels Klim discovers worlds within our own—exotic civilizations and fabulous creatures scattered across the underside of the earth's crust and, at the earth's center, a small, inhabited planet orbiting around a miniature sun. In an epic journey, Klim visits countries led by sentient and contemplative trees, a kingdom of intelligent apes preoccupied with fashion and change, a land whose inhabitants don’t speak out of their mouths, neighboring countries of birds locked in an eternal war, and a land where string basses talk musically to one another. Brave, inquisitive, and greedy, Klim faces many challenges, the greatest of which are his own temptations. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is a classic in speculative fiction and was the first fully realized novel set underground in a hollow earth. First published in 1741, it has earned comparisons to Jonathan Swift’s contemporaneous fantasy, Gulliver’s Travels.

    His two volume book is here offered between two covers. Its purpose is to provide a means to eliminate psychological conditioning and to attain liberation. Containing the instructions of the sage Vasistha to Lord Rama, this scripture is full of intricately woven tales, the kind a great teacher might tell to hold the interest of a student.

    Determined that her daughter should not be ignorant of the ways of men and love, Nanna seeks to “educate” the naïve Pippa. She tells of women—whores, housewives, and nuns all being essentially the same; and of how to win men—discreetly and with good manners. But mostly, she reveals to Pippa the secrets of her art as a courtesan. The ensuing dialogue, laden with satiric twists and naughty puns, offers a fresh and lively example of the harlot’s world, displaying a frankness that confides in today’s reader as shrewdly as it was intended in 16th-century Rome. Italian satirist and poet Pietro Aretino was one of the most versatile writers of the 16th century; the author of plays, poetry, and letters, he is now principally remembered as the originator of European pornography.

    They give a crucial new impetus to the story of the Grail by establishing a provenance for the sacred vessel - and for the Round Table itself - in the Biblical past; and through the controlling figure of Merlin they link the story of Joseph of Arimathea with the mythical British history of Vortigern and Utherpendragon, the birth of Arthur, and the sword in the stone, and then with the knightly adventures of Perceval's Grail quest and the betrayal and death of Arthur, creating the very first Arthurian cycle. Ambitious, original and complete in its conception, this trilogy - translated here for the first time - is a finely paced, vigorous piece of storytelling that provides an outstanding example of the essentially oral nature of early prose. NIGEL BRYANT is head of drama at Marlborough College. He has also provided editions in English of the anonymous thirteenth-century romance Perlesvaus, published as The High Book of the Grail, and Chretien's Perceval: The Story of the Grail.

    Milarepa was an eleventh-century Buddhist poet and saint, a cotton-clad yogi who avoided the scholarly institutions of his time and wandered from village to village, teaching enlightenment and the path to Buddhahood through his spontaneously composed songs. Wherever he went, crowds of people gathered to hear his sweet sounding voice "singing the Dharma." The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, says the book's translator, "has been read as the biography of a saint, a guide book for devotions, a manual of Buddhist yoga, a volume of songs and poems, and even a collection of Tibetan folklore, and fairy tales." With titles like "The Salvation of the Dead," "A Woman's Role in the Dharma," and "Challenge from a Wise Demoness," Milrepa's poems are filled with fascinating tales of miraculous encounters and colorful imagery, and present a valuable insight into the living quality of Tibetan Buddhism. Central as this book is to Tibetan culture, the arcane dialect and obscurity of many original passages daunted translators for centuries; this was the first complete version of the classic to appear in the West.

    In his national bestseller "The Blood Countess," Andrei Codrescu brought to life the bloodthirsty royal Elizabeth Bathory, who embodied nearly all the contradictions of the seventeenth century. Now he depicts the astonishing life of the legendary Casanova, as the old adventurer relives his life while writing his memoirs in a provincial Bohemian castle at the end of the eighteenth century. Far from being defeated by age, Casanova delights in the maidservants, reacts with intellectual vigor to the unfolding of the French Revolution, and collaborates with Mozart on "Don Giovanni." Long considered the rhapsodist of an age of aristocratic mirth, scandal, and innumerable affairs, Casanova was also a first-rate intellect who corresponded and argued with Voltaire and Rousseau. His published work, besides the celebrated "History of My Life," includes a multivolume fantasy fiction novel that predates and anticipates Jules Verne; translations of Italian classics into French; and a number of plays that were produced on the great stages of Europe.Casanova's romantic legend overshadowed his literary work, which was, for the most part, not published until 1960. The fate of his writings was nearly as fabulous and intriguing as that of their author. Still, even in abridged, bowdlerized, and fragmentary form, Casanova's memoirs have inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, and now, Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's vivid fictional account illuminates the interest we still havein this uncompromising and magical libertine, while it imagines how his life would have continued if Casanova's immortality had extended beyond the literary.In Codrescu's retelling of the Casanova legend, readers are introduced to an age far less inhibited than our own, and far more interesting in its vices. At once a libertine, a defender of women, a reactionary, a revolutionary, a brilliant observer, and a visionary, Casanova was a man ahead of his time both in thought and in action. Finally, in this inventive and absorbing work, Casanova is given due credit for his writings, his philosophies, and, of course, for the amorous magic that has been made known to so many.

    

    The bus was unthinkably tall, made of yellow, orange and pink rice paper. That was a dream, but this romance soon intersects with reality.

    Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own dissident politics.  The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character’s decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story’s clear link to his own case—and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented—Céline was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a French writer and physician best known for the novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Céline was accused of collaboration during World War II and fled France in 1944 to live first in Germany, then in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year; an amnesty in 1951 allowed him to return to France. Céline remains anathema to a large segment of French society for his antisemitic writings; at the same time his novels are enormously admired by each new generation.

    Richly illustrated in pop art, and littered with absurd situations - which the author assures us are completely true - Welcome to Advertising! Now, Get Lost has prompted at least one ad guru to regret that he hadn't written it himself.