Showing results for "Against the Grain" in Literature & Fiction

Originally published in 1966, Susan Sontag's first collection of essays is a modern classic and includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation", as well as, her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

Dive into the mesmerizing world of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 masterpiece, known as the Bible of Decadence and famously adored by Oscar Wilde. In Against Nature (or Against The Grain in this translation), we follow the reclusive Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, a life-long aesthete who retreats from society into his own carefully crafted artificial paradises. However, this journey is not a solemn reflection; Des Esseintes grand ambitions lead to ludicrous failures, resulting in both personal dissatisfaction and health troubles, while an unsuspecting tortoise becomes an unwitting victim of ...

“THE BOOK THAT DORIAN GRAY LOVED AND THAT INSPIRED OSCAR WILDE”. Such is the enticing epigraph of one early translation of Huysmans’ cult novel of 1884, which is also routinely called the Bible of Decadence. Accurate descriptions, both, of this bizarre masterpiece which has reverberated ever since through high and popular culture.“Against Nature” (or in this version “Against The Grain”) explores to the furthest limit the life of the world-rejecting aesthete living a reclusive existence devoted entirely to artificial paradises of his own devising. This is no solemn tract, however:...

Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.