De Profundis

Written from Wilde's prison cell at Reading Gaol to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis explodes the conventions of the traditional love letter and offers a scathing indictment of Douglas's behavior, a mournful elegy for Wilde's own lost greatness, and an impassioned plea for reconciliation. At once a bracingly honest account of ruinous attachment and a profound meditation on human suffering, De Profundis is a classic of gay literature. Richard Ellmann calls De Profundis "a love letter...One of the greatest, and the longest, ever written." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains newly commissioned notes.

De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín. At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by May of the same year, Wilde was in Reading prison sentenced to hard labour. 'De Profundis' is an epistolic account of Oscar Wilde's spiritual journey while in prison, and describes his new, shocking conviction that 'the supreme vice is shallowness'. This edition also includes further letters to his wife, his friends, the Home Secretary, newspaper editors and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas - Bosie - himself, as well as 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', the heart-rending poem about a man sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. This Penguin edition is based on the definitive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland. Colm Tóibín's introduction explores Wilde's duality in love, politics and literature. This edition also includes notes on the text and suggested further reading. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. His three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and A House of Pomegranates, together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, won him a reputation as a writer with an original talent, a reputation enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, and a collection of stories, Mothers and Sons. His essay collection Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar appeared in 2002. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.

The Diana Jones 2002 Award Nominated game of psychological horror returns in an all new, and expanded, 2nd Edition. Blending the imagination of H. P. Lovecraft and other contemporary horror and conspiracy writers and themes, De Profundis is a correspondence-based story-telling game that can be played from the point of view of participants from a variety of eras. Whether you take on the role of a Victorian investigator, a soldier from the front line during WW1 or WW2 confronted by the Weird, a government investigator looking into the strange and unknown, an internet conspiracy theorist in the modern age who gets in too deep, or someone else entirely, De Profundis provides a great alternative in gaming that allows you to participate in an interactive story with friends old and new. Not requiring the usual face-to-face aspect of most traditional RPGs, the game caters for people who find it hard to maintain a regular gaming group due to time commitments, or for those who don't have any fellow gamers in their neighbourhood. Utilising a mix of letter writing, email and text based gaming - depending on your chosen era of play - it's a perfect game for the modern time strapped gamer.

'I have nothing to declare,' Wilde once told an American customs official, 'except my genius.' A good part of that genius is evident in the essays and poems included in this volume. There is the intellectual genius of The Soul of Man under Socialism, in which he clearly foresaw the dangers of economic bureaucracy and state-worship: for Wilde socialism meant liberation and individuality, not enslavement. Then there is the emotional genius of De Profundis, the long, introspective and often hostile letter he addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison. And there is the poetical genius of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, in which Wilde's generous nature could movingly express for another's misery the sorrow he found it hard to express for his own. This collection contains, too, many examples of that humorous and epigrammic genius which captured the London theatre and which, by suddenly casting light from an unexpected angle, widened the bounds of truth.

Contains De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Soul of Man under Socialism, The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist.

The Suspiria is a collection of prose poems, or what De Quincey called “impassioned prose,” erratically written and published starting in 1854. Each Suspiria is a short essay written in reflection of the opium dreams De Quincey would experience over the course of his lifetime addiction, and they are considered by some critics to be some of the finest examples of prose poetry in all of English literature. De Quincey originally planned them as a sequel of sorts to his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but the first set was published separately in Blackwood’s Magazine in the spring and summer of that 1854. De Quincey then published a revised version of those first Suspiria, along with several new ones, in his collected works. During his life he kept a master list of titles of the Suspiria he planned on writing, and completed several more before his death; those that survived time and fire were published posthumously in 1891.