Dedalus: 154 books

The combination of decadence,the macabre and the demonic, with depraved female heroines made Boito's stories an immediate and popular success in fin de siecle Italy.Today Boito is seen as one of the major Italian authors of his period and the master of the novella form. Outside Italy lLuchino Visconti's...

Sun Piao is released from Ankang, the psychiatric hospital for Chinese dissidents, and demoted to working in the Vice Squad, ostensibly a non-job since the Chinese authorities claim there is no vice in the People's Republic. But, before you know it, he is trying to solve a string of murders of prostitutes,...

'Entertaining and very nasty, this calculatedly intellectual comedy succeeds well as an unheroic quest starring Philippe, an interesting monster of disarming modesty.' The Listener 'Robert Irwin's third novel confirms that, whatever his other main concerns may be, he has thoroughly mastered the art of...

'The author', the aging Simplicissimus and his former comrade Tearway (a character from Simplicissimus) happen to meet in a village inn. First of all 'the author' describes how he was caught by Courage and her band of gypsies and conned into writing her life-story for her. In the main part of the novel,...

The Bells of Bruges is a study of obsessive love which is steeped in the melancholy beauty of Bruges. There are three loves in the life of Joris Borluut, the town carillonneur of Bruges. He marries the fiery Barbara, whose dark beauty is a reminder of Belgium's Spanish heritage. Repelled by her harshness...

Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Celestine is one of the great female characters in literature. Rhoda Koenig in The Sunday Times The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair.Mirbeau brings a journalist's...

'A powerful and outstanding work." Gustave Flaubert �The Vatard Sisters brought Huysmans to the notice of the public and revealed him as a man who could paint word-pictures which put earlier practitioners like Gautier and Edmond de Goncourt in the shade...The novel is a story of two working-class...

Huysmans novel, though it is clearly rooted in the preoccupations of the late 19th century, is remarkably prophetic about the concerns of our own recent fin de siecle. With its allusions to, amongst other things, Satanic child abuse, alternative medicine, New Age philosophy and female sexuality, the...

Anatole France called Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) the 'greatest living French writer'. The stories Francis Amery has collected and translated under the not inappropriate title The Angels of Perversity are from the first half of Gourmont's career, when, as a writer of short fictions he established himself...

'In the catalogue of novels about lives distorted by unhappy schooldays, Mirbeau's contribution must be one of the bitterest. He follows the young, carefree Sebastien from a small French town to the bleak Breton coast. There the Jesuit fathers, in whom his snobbish father has placed so much trust,heap...

� A brief but sparkling bon-bon from the French writer Jacques Cazotte, who was guillotined in 1792. A young captain, stationed in Naples, is tempted into summoning up Beelzebub, who appears first in the guise of a hideous camel, then as a cute spaniel, and lastly - and most dangerously - as a gorgeous,...

Eça de Queiroz's first novel and Portugal’s first mystery-cum-detective novel in its first English translation Two friends are kidnapped by several masked men, who, to judge by their manners and their accent are men of the best society. One of the friends is a doctor, and the masked men say...

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....

'M. Phocas reveals, indeed revels, in this literary incest as the 'diabolical Englishman', Claudius Ethal, a snobbish painter, seeks to corrupt the narrator - by sending him Goya prints. A Curiosity.' The Observer Monsieur de Phocas ranks with A Rebours as the summation of the French Decadent Movement. Monsieur de Phocas will appeal strongly to readers of Oscar Wilde and fin-de-siecle fiction.