EXTREME LITERATURE

Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

By Arthur Rimbaud

The classic influential poems by Rimbaud, in a bilingual en face edition featuring acclaimed translations by Louise Varése.

Nineteen Eighty-four

By George Orwell

Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.

Narcissus and Goldmund

By Hermann Hesse

This is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character who set each other on different paths in life.

The Wasp Factory

By Iain Banks

Powerful, perverse, and engrossing, this controversial novel offers a graphic portrait of a serial killer told in the first-person. "Read it if you dare!"--"The Daily Express".

Howl, and Other Poems

By Allen Ginsberg

This collection of poems by Ginsberg created a sensation when it was first published in 1956, becoming the subject of an obscenity trial and changing the literary landscape forever.

Valley of the Dolls

By Jacqueline Susann

Three women seek escape as they learn about the bitterness, corruption, and falsehoods of the show-business world.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. Look for The Testaments, the bestselling, award-winning the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic. Includes an introduction by Margaret Atwood

American Psycho

By Bret Easton Ellis

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. "A seminal book.” —The Washington Post One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. “A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing.... An important book.” —Katherine Dunn, bestselling author of Geek Love Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards!

Lolita

By Vladimir Nabokov

The most famous and controversial novel from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century tells the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. “The conjunction of a sense of humor with a sense of horror [results in] satire of a very special kind.”—The New Yorker One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Ficciones. C Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan

By Jorge Luis Borges

Seventeen short stories.

Closer

By Dennis Cooper

Like Jean Genet and William Burroughs, Dennis Cooper assaults the senses as he engages the mind with visions of nightmare intensity in a world where stimulation without excitement and experience without emotion are prized.

Nadja

By André Breton

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

By Lewis Carroll

First published in 1865, these endearing tales of an imaginative child's dream world by Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, are written with charming simplicity. While delighting children with a heroine who represents their own thoughts and feelings about growing up, the tale is appreciated by adults as a gentle satire on education, politics, literature, and Victorian life in general. All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess. . . and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.

EXTREME LITERATURE

Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

Nineteen Eighty-four

Narcissus and Goldmund

None

The Wasp Factory

None

None

None

None

None

None

Howl, and Other Poems

Valley of the Dolls

The Handmaid's Tale

American Psycho

Lolita

Ficciones. C Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan

Closer

Nadja

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland