Product Description: The infamous inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grayis translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics. A wildly original fin-de-siècle novel, Against Nature contains only one character...read more

Stories by the nineteenth-century French writer provide an ironic look at an unpublished author, the occult, language, religious life, morality, the commercialization of art, and the arrogance of science

Product Description: Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huysmans’ novels, is the perfect example of what the French naturalists wanted a novel to be. This dark and mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism about a Parisian clerk seeking spiritual contentment is the perfect introduction to the pleasures of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), whose exquisite style is ironically the most perfect remedy for any reader’s taedium vitae...read more

Product Description: A novel, translated by Robert Baldick. A young man staying in a Paris boarding house finds a hole in the wall above his bed. Alternately voyeur and seer, he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors: childbirth, first love, marriage, betrayal, illness and death all present themselves to him through this spy hole...read more

Product Description: Robert Baldick's Life of J.-K. Huysmans has become not just a standard reference work, to be consulted as regularly as the writing of the author whose life it chronicles, but a work of literature in its own right. First published fifty years ago, Baldick's classic biography presents a compelling narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 1880s, and from the occult vogue of the 1890s to the Catholic Revival of the turn of the century - and it is written with such impeccable scholarship that it is still relied on today as regards matters of fact and detail...read more

When a woman is found strangled in a stable near Lock 14, Inspector Maigret investigates, but finds her husband both unmoved and unhelpful as he follows a dark trail of whiskey-fueled orgies and a nomadic lifestyle to find the killer. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Product Description: The only available edition in English of the greatest of all French autobiographiesBy the time he came to write his extraordinary, highly entertaining memoirs, Chateaubriand had witnessed some of the iconic figures and events of French history—from the court of Louis XVI, to the reign of Napoleon, to the disaster of Waterloo, to life under the Restoration...read more

Product Description: Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel, the book that is increasingly seen to lie at the heart of his outsize achievement as a chronicler of modern self and society. In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood...read more

Product Description: One of 60 low-priced classic texts published to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary. All the titles are extracts from "Penguin Classics" titles.

Product Description: Against all expectations Marcel Féron has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited...read more