A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally en...(展开全部)

A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural ord...(展开全部)

A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally en...(展开全部)

A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural ord...(展开全部)

Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fiction, Joris-Karl Huysman produced in 1884 a novel unlike any other of his time. Against Nature is the story of Des Esseintes, an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life. As Des Esseintes hides away in his museum of high taste, Huysman offers the reader a treasury of cultur...(展开全部)

Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fiction, Joris-Karl Huysman produced in 1884 a novel unlike any other of his time. Against Nature is the story of Des Esseintes, an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life. As Des Esseintes hides away in his museum of high taste, Huysman offers the reader a treasury of cultur...(展开全部)

Set in an era witness to some of the most avant-garde and scintillating scientific discoveries and artistic creations of the last century, this novel takes readers behind the scenes and into the lives of many of history's most fascinating and revolutionary minds, all while posing the question - could a mathematical discovery be so controversial and threatening as to drive one t...(展开全部)

The third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News', 'Accordion Crimes' spans generations, continents and a century and confirms the hallucinatory power of Proulx's writing. 'Accordion Crimes' is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion-maker and his son, carrying little more th...(展开全部)

Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News, " winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now we have Proulx's new novel, "Accordion Crimes, " a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. "Accordion Crimes" opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accord...(展开全部)

Accordion Crimes traces the long odyssey of a button accordion, an instrument made by a Sicilian who immigrates to New Orleans in 1891. Imprisoned in a round-up of Italian suspects after the political murder of the chief of police, the accordion maker is lynched, and his accordion falls into the hands of Apollo, a black steamboat screwman. The instrument begins its lon...(展开全部)