Maldoror And Poems

Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, André Gide and André Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece.

Andre Breton wrote that MALDOROR is the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.' First published in 1869, MALDOROR is the work of a mysterious genius about whom little is known aside from his birth in Uruguay, 1846, and his early death in Paris, 1870. His writings, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, bewildered his contemporaries but have since taken their place alongside other French classics of transgression such as Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. A unique translation.'

One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, André Gide and André Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

'Les Chants de Maldoror' was virtually ignored when first published in 1869, a year before the author's death in Paris in 1870. Decades later the Surrealists discovered the work and hailed Lautr

In John Ashbery’s haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler’s experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar—not even ourselves Hotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection’s title poem is itself an evocative echo: Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym taken by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a radical nineteenth-century French writer about whom little is known except that he produced one remarkable presymbolist epic prose poem called The Songs of Maldoror and died of fever at the age of twenty-four in a hotel in Paris during Napoleon III’s siege of the city in 1870. Addressed to lonely ghosts, lingering guests, and others, the poems in Hotel Lautréamont present a study of exile, loss, meaning, and the artistic constructions we create to house them.

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.