(Paperback)

Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where her indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise).

(Paperback)

The cult novel of fin de sicle decadence that inspired Oscar Wilde

(Paperback)

Durtal, a shy, censorious man, is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous fifteenth-century child-murderer thought to be the original for 'Bluebeard'. Bored and disgusted by the vulgarity of everyday life, Durtal seeks spiritual solace by immersing himself in another age.

(Paperback)

This 1882 novella, a key work in Huysmans literary development prefiguring in its protagonist the figure of Jean des Esseintes, the hero of rebours, written two years later is accompanied here by another masterly study of human despair, M. Bougrans Retirement.