Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange child...

A new translation finally appears of one of the seminal books in the history of literature. Adored by the Surrealists, Les Chants de Maldoror was hailed by them as a dark progenitor of their movement, and its author, Le Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) elevated to the status of literary idol. It was in these pages that André Breton discovered the phrase which would come to represent the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance: as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella ...

Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of w...

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 ...

This selection of works by Wallace Stevens--the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet”--was first published in 1967. Edited by the poet's daughter Holly Stevens, it contains all the major long poems and sequences, and every shorter poem of lasting value in Stevens' career, including some not printed in his earlier Collected Works. Included also is a short play by Stevens, "Bowl, Cat and Broomstick."

This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing.The macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing. It is a long narrative prose poem which celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style and with a...

These tales - sc-fi, ghost-stories, gothic fables, oriental allegories - were written in the first decade of the century and are now translated for the first time.They make a magnificent introduction to his bizarre genius, which combined the sharp Bohemian scepticism of his contemporary Kafka with the mordant humour and outreach of Swift. Independent on Sunday "Meyrink's short stories epitomised the non-plus-ultra of all modern writing. Their magnificent colour, their spine-chilling and bi...

The Horla is presented as a series of diary entries written by an educated, increasingly tormented gentleman living in solitude on his country estate near Rouen. His initial feelings of malaise and feverish restlessness soon give way to a terrifying certainty: he is not alone. He is being slowly, subtly drained of his life force and sanity by an invisible, parasitic entity, a creature he names the Horla. Through meticulous observation and escalating terror, the narrator tr...

Lawrence Durrell's success as a novelist may have tended to obscure his achievement as a poet and in poetry. It is primarily as a lyrical poet of places that he was acknowledged to excel, but in Collected Poems it will be found that the range of feeling and ideas, of wit and experience, and also of style, is remarkable. The whole volume is charged with Durrell's response to the 'spirit of place', which is one of this exceptional gifts as a writer.'They range from affecting...

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a form which Baudelaire...

Selected Poems draws on all the books Elizabeth Jennings published before Growing-Points. It represents the poet's own distillation of the first two decades of her writing - the poems which established her as one of the most passionate and precise of our writers, a woman of humane values, religious vision and natural sympathy. 'The outstanding thing about Jennings's poetry,' wrote Douglass Dunn, 'is its wisdom, hard-earned from grief and religious faith.' And Peter Levi says, 'She is one o...

Editor Duane Parsons has assembled a treasure-trove of rare macabre stories for lovers of classic fantasy and horror. From ghosts of mind and spirit to exotic paranormal tales, each story in this volume has never before appeared in an anthology. Included are:The Silent Man, by Henry Fothergill ChorleyThe Strange Ormonds, by Leitch RitchieThe Mysterious Wedding: A Danish Story, by Heinrich SteffansThe Burial by Fire, by Louisa Medina HamblinThe Vampyre, b...