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Against NatureBy: J. K. Huysmans Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As J -K Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. RRP: £8.99 |
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MagnusBy: Sylvie Germain Magnus is a deeply moving and enigmatic novel about the Holocaust, which has been Sylvie Germain most commercially successful novel in France. Magnus is a man searching for his own identity, who pieces together the complex puzzle of his life, which turns out to be closer to a painting by Edward Munch than the romantic tale of family heroism and self-sacrifice on which he was nurtured by the woman he believed was his mother. Sylvie Germain in Magnus uses imagination and intuition to unlock the enigma of human life and confer on history the power of myth and fable. RRP: £9.99 |
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Memoirs of a Gnostic DwarfBy: David Madsen 'Inquisitions, religious sects and orgies in Renaissance Italy makes for a historical caper with a blinding plot;and the eponymous street-urchin-turned-papal-envoy is an unforgettable narrator.' Sophie Ratcliffe in The Times RRP: £8.99 |
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The Arabian NightmareBy: Robert Irwin The Arabian Nightmare pervades the darkness of medieval Cairo. RRP: £6.99 |
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The Bells of BrugesBy: Georges Rodenbach Shortlisted for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for 2008. 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 and violence, he starts an affair with her sister, the gentle, soulful, fair-haired Godelieve. When her sister discovers their affair, Godelieve enters a Beguine convent and Joris devotes himself to his first love, the old city of Bruges. RRP: £9.99 |
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The Decadent CookbookBy: Durian Gray, Medlar LucanEdited by: Jerome Fletcher, Alex Martin "If meat is the hard-core of food- as- sex, The Decadent Cookbook is a walk on the wild side, a book for those who scorn not only the Prohibitions of Leviticus but also the dictates of common sense, good health and kindness to animals." John Ryle in The Guardian RRP: £9.99 |
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The Decadent HandbookBy: James Doyle, Amelia Hodsdon, Rowan Pelling The ultimate lifestyle guide for the people who want to transform the spirit of the age, or failing that, ignore it altogether. Featuring contributions by the bad, dangerous and eccentric free spirits of contemporary society, The Decadent Handbook will become the bible for the modern libertine. Contributors include Hari Kunzru,Tom Holland,Salena Godden,Michael Bywater, Lisa Hilton, Helen Walsh, Michael Bywater, Vanora Bennett, Medlar Lucan, Andrew Crumey, Durian Gray,Nicholas Royle,Mark Mason, Alan Jenkins and Robert Irwin. RRP: £9.99 |
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The Dedalus Book of AbsintheBy: Phil Baker Beginning with the 1905 Absinthe Murders, this book offers a cultural history of absinthe, from its modest origins as a herbal tonic through its luxuriantly morbid heyday in the late nineteenth century. RRP: £6.99 |
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The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000By: Mike Mitchell Ever since the fin de siecle Austrian literature has been fertile ground for fantasy in the widest sense and the genre was taken up again by new generations after the Second World War. The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy:1890-2000 will contain stories from authors of the 1890s(Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), the years around the First World War (Kafka, Meyrink), the post-war era, when Kafka was rediscovered, (Jeannie Ebner, Ilse Aichinger) to the present day (H C Artmann, Michael Koehlmeier). The stories range from the 'freudian' to the 'kafkaesque', to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural. RRP: £12.99 |
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The MaiasBy: Eca de Queiroz Winner of PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize for 2008. Winner of The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for 2008 Carlos is the grandson of Afonso da Maia, the last surviving member of one of Lisbon’s wealthiest and most illustrious families. Carlos is good, handsome, clever, eager to contribute something to society, and yet he appears, as he himself puts it, 'to be one of those weak hearts, soft and flaccid, incapable of preserving any true emotion'. Then, one day, walking along Lisbon's grubby streets he sees a woman who seems to him like a goddess who has just stepped down from the clouds. When he finally meets the beautiful Maria Eduarda, the attraction proves to be as mutual as it is profound. In the plenitude of that love, Carlos seems, in his best friend Ega's words, 'a truly fortunate being', until Fate steps in - in the form of a grizzled, left-wing newspaper hack from Paris - and everything unravels. RRP: £15.00 |
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The Staff RoomBy: Markus Orths Kranich is a newly qualified teacher about to take up his first post. As soon as he arrives at the school he is plunged into a nightmare kafkaesque world which has all the worst features of a totalitarian state. Very soon he finds himself caught between the Education Authority Police, Secret Security Officers and the CG, the Conspiracy Group, that aims to undermine the school system but only ' verbally, since no one would want to put their own job at risk’. The four pillars of the school system, as the headmaster explains on Kranich’s very first day there, are 'fear, misery, pretence and lies'. In The Staff Room Orths, himself a teacher in his first post, has written a grotesque satire which is both absurd and extremely funny. RRP: £6.99 |