A cat shaped pendant with magical powers, takes a detective on a precarious journey through a mysterious city. Award winning artist and animator Patrick Jenkins has devised a story as affecting as his complex line art. A mixture of film noir and magic realism that explores surrealism and metaphysics through graphic storytelling. A game where reality is always in question. Smokey halftones and sumptuous linework are binding elements in a sequence of bizarre twists. A layered vortex of visua...

Spirite is one of Gautier's major prose works, yet one of his most neglected. It is the tale of a woman who dies before the man she loves even notices she exists. There follows a sometimes thrilling, sometimes touching story of interaction between the spirit world and reality. It is a mystical masterpiece. " Posterity will judge him to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but in Europe." Charles Baudelaire

The initial part of the story focuses on the romantic life of a middle aged man named Swann. Proust has used poetic style of words to describe the nature and environment of France. His sentence structure is impressive and filled with searing insightful and humorous criticisms of French society.

This classic Austrian novella paints a deeply moving portrait of a woman whose quest for passion and purpose comes at a steep priceThe less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly.So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C—recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion of a desperate stranger, she disc...

Dedalus should be treasured: a small independent publisher that regularly produces works of European genius at which the behemoths wouldn't sniff. If the corporations did care to look at this new work, they would find, on the surface, a precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning and Tod Browning. Bruges, an amalgam of greyish drowsiness"...

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words "dangerous"—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and ...

A devastating novel about the treachery of love by Maupassant, now in a new translation by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet and translator Richard HowardOlivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name as a young man with his Cleopatra, he has gone on to establish himself as “the chosen painter of Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls.” And though h...

Alien Hearts was the last book that Guy de Maupassant finished before his death at the early age of forty-three. It is the most original and psychologically penetrating of his several novels, and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. André Mariolle is a rich, handsome, gifted young man who cannot settle on what to do with himself. Madame de Burne, a glacially dazzling beauty, wants Mariolle to attend her exclusive salon for artists, comp...

'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent**'F**ood for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times*A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ...

The Dedalus Book of Decadence looks south to sample the essence of fine French decadent writing. It succeeds in delivering a range of writers either searching vigorously for the thrill of a healthy crime or lamenting their impuissance from a sickly stupor. Andrew St George in The Independent "An invaluable sampler of spleen, everything from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Dowson and Flecker. Let's hear it for 'luxe, calme et volupte'." Anne Billson in Time Out

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the girl of his dreams - is one of the best-known classics of German literature. Deeply imbued with the style and sentiment of German Romanticism, and philosophical and poetic in its approach to nature and existence, "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing" is at once an exhilarating romp and an exemplary distillation of nineteenth-c...

No one, not even Toulouse-Lautrec, was so tireless a tracker of Paris�s genius loci as Huysmans. Like many of his radical contemporaries, he was obsessed by the idea of beauty within the ugliness of back-street Paris, by the thought that the distortions of depravity presented a truer picture of our spiritual nature than conventional religion or revolutionary excess. The excellent introduction to these cameos show how Huysmans saw his art as complementary to the painter�s. As the storie...