James Doyle

Rowan Pelling

Amelia Hodsdon

50 decadent courtiers contribute essays, stories, poems, reminiscences, and advice on decadent themes in an anti-lifestyle guide for the modern libertine. Readers can 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 have chosen to be remunerated with Absinthe. Decadence here means a kind of colourfully reckless nonconformism. Nick Groom's essay on Decadent Outcasts, in which he demonstrates how the image of the decadent poet has been appropriated by the modern rock star, is not to your taste, then there is always Louise Welsh planning her own funeral to savour and enjoy - or Mick Brown's analysis of the film Performance, William Napier's guide to Roman Decadence in which he relates that the Emperor Heliogabulus's favourite foods were 'flamingos' brains and the head of parakeets', or Nicholas Royles noirish short story 'The Child', about a man sucked into a Mancunian underworld of cinephiles, sex parties and bent coppers. Maria Alvarez even suggest sthat decadence may turn out to be a little dull. In the end, she says, it becomes 'a state of aestheticised satiety.'

The Decadent Handbook

A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter--the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

Erotic Stories

A treasury of darkly amorous tales from different time periods and cultures features classical excerpts ranging from Pauline Râeage's "Story of O" to Nicholson Baker's "The Fermata" and Sarah Waters' "Tipping the Velvet."

Rowan Pelling

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