Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

CHARLES NICHOLL, author of SOMEBODY ELSE: ARTHUR RIMBAUD IN AFRICA 1880-91 has written of Dennis J. Carlile's translation of RIMBAUD:THE WORKS."These are the best renditions of Rimbaud in English since Wallace Fowlie's nearly forty years ago, and many of them surpass that high standard. These poems have been wrestled with, which is the very least they demand, and successfully brought back home. Carlile gets the difficult switches and swoops of tone mostly right, and the linguistic ...

Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings. This comprehensive selection of his works includes 'Aurélia', the memoir of his madness; the haunting novella of love and memory 'Sylvie' (considered to be a masterpiece by Proust); the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras'; as well as Nerval's experimental fictions and ...

Henri Frédéric Amiel was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic. Born in Geneva in 1821, he was descended from a Huguenot family driven to Switzerland by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral phi...

The meaning of poetry and the sociological and political significance of art are dealt with in these letters.

First published in 1982, this penetrating, immensely readable biography of the brilliant poet, translator, and art critic, F. W. J. Hemmings gives us a fascinating new perspective on Baudelaire's extraordinary, complex personality, his artistic achievements, and his tormented life.Hemmings, the noted biographer of Zola and Alexandre Dumas, has drawn on a great volume of material for this work, much of which came to light as late at the 70s. He shows how Baudelaire's unhappy childho...

In this unique work, Henry Miller gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years.Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller’s favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere––au...

'To the English, I am "shocking"...What's more, French, which is disgusting; republican, which is abominable; exiled, which is repulsive; defeated, which is infamous. To top it all off, a poet...' Victor Hugo dominated literary life in France for over half a century, pouring forth novels, poems, plays, and other writings with unflagging zest and vitality. Here, for the first time in English, all aspects of his work are represented within a single volume. Famous scenes from...

PAUL VERLAINE (1844 - 1896) was a leading light of the French Parnassian poets, highly praised for his early collection of verse, Ftes galantes (1869). In 1872 he deserted Paris, wife and child, and the Parnassians to travel with young poet Arthur Rimbaud on a quest to "renew poetic vision." Use of drugs, alcohol, sex and violence in this pursuit led to gunshots, a prison-term, exile and the end of the two poets' relationship. Throughout this period and over the following two decades of hi...

The first book to address everyone who relishes reading Proust and wants to know more about how his writing works.This is a matchless close reading of a literary masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, and a lesson in how to read the Great Books profitably and pleasurably.‘Read this excellent book’ Stuart Jeffries, Guardian‘Very refreshing… a splendidly tough-minded and generous introduction’ Gabriel Josipovici, Independent‘Brilliant’ Peter Conrad, Observer...

John Fraser, Desires: Sixty-five French poems and one small but famous German one, translated and introduced by John Fraser.The core of Desires is a mini-anthology of sixty-five French poems translated by John Fraser and described in the foreword by scholar-translator Benoit Tadié as "beautiful" and "intensely empathetic." Taken from Fraser's major online anthology A New Book of Verse, they belong in an emergent re-seeing of French poetic history.Part I consists largely of...

Narration is conducted on behalf of the eldest of six brothers - a prisoner of the Chillon Castle, a terrible prison with intolerable conditions of detention. Five of his close relatives have already died. Two of them could not stand the conclusion in the cellars of the castle. The prisoner lost count of days and years, and when he was released, he became so accustomed to imprisonment that the outbreak did not cause him any emotion. Pretty illustrations by Elena Odarich provide you with ne...