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 spiritu
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J.-K. Huysmans’ Stranded (En Rade 1887), published just three years after the iconoclastic Against Nature, sees him again breaking new ground and pushing back the boundaries of the novel form. Stamped throughout with his characteristic black humour, Str
This anthology is the largest ever selection from the Decadent and Symbolist writers of the French fin-de-siècle — a period whose social and spiritual ills had so much in common with those of today.The selection is based on a series of essays on contem
