Dedalus Ebooks: 136 books

Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900) is considered to be Portugal�s greatest novelist and one of its finest prose writers. In The Mandarin he turns his satirical eye on the sin of avarice and asks the following question: ‘In the depths of China there lives a mandarin who is richer than any king spoken...

In this volume, comprising one short novel and six short stories, the reader is introduced to a dazzling variety of worlds and characters: a deceived husband who finds that jealousy is not the answer, a lovelorn Greek poet-turned-waiter working in a Charing Cross hotel, a saintly young woman soured by...

Le Calvaire is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, which recounts the tortured and traumatic coming-of-age of the narrator Jean Mintie.It paints a nightmarish picture of late nineteenth-century French society. Mintie's progress through life is a descent into Hell, a plumbing of the lower depths,...

Dedalus specialises in fiction that could roughly be classified as gothic or arcane - or indeed gnostic. First published in 1995, this one immediately caught readers' imaginations and has since become something of a contemporary classic. It has a cute frame opening (' It is not necessary for me to relate...

Memoirs of a Byzantine Eunuch is an archetypal Dedalus novel and bears comparison with David Madsen's masterpiece: Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf. 'Zeno, living in ninth-century Byzantium, has had a rough time of it.Taken from his native town and castrated by Norse pirates, he finds himself stranded by...

'Monsieur Bang, you are the first impressionist author in the world. Claude Monet. 'This is a masterpiece, both moving and thought-provoking. Its deliberate lightness of authorial touch, rendered superbly by translator W Glyn Jones, allows us to gaze into depths of heartache.' Paul Binding in The Independent...

One of the giants of popular fiction, with total sales of around fifty million books, Dennis Wheatley held twentieth-century Britain spellbound. His Black Magic novels like The Devil Rides Out created an oddly seductive and luxurious vision of Satanism, but in reality he was as interested in politics...

Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and...

No one, not even Toulouse-Lautrec, was so tireless a tracker of Paris�s genius loci as Huysmans. Like many of his radical contemporaries, he was obsessed by the idea of beauty within the ugliness of back-street Paris, by the thought that the distortions of depravity presented a truer picture...

'Mitchell a prolific literary translator, looks at the enigmatic Gustav Meyrink (whose novels he's translated) in this vibrant biographical debut. Meyrink, a Prague native, was prominent in the late 1800s through the early 1900s, oddly enough, as a banker, mystic and satirist (best known for The Golem)....

The combination of decadence,the macabre and the demonic, with depraved female heroines made Boito's stories an immediate and popular success in fin de siecle Italy.Today Boito is seen as one of the major Italian authors of his period and the master of the novella form. Outside Italy lLuchino Visconti's...

Sun Piao is released from Ankang, the psychiatric hospital for Chinese dissidents, and demoted to working in the Vice Squad, ostensibly a non-job since the Chinese authorities claim there is no vice in the People's Republic. But, before you know it, he is trying to solve a string of murders of prostitutes,...

'Entertaining and very nasty, this calculatedly intellectual comedy succeeds well as an unheroic quest starring Philippe, an interesting monster of disarming modesty.' The Listener 'Robert Irwin's third novel confirms that, whatever his other main concerns may be, he has thoroughly mastered the art of...

'The author', the aging Simplicissimus and his former comrade Tearway (a character from Simplicissimus) happen to meet in a village inn. First of all 'the author' describes how he was caught by Courage and her band of gypsies and conned into writing her life-story for her. In the main part of the novel,...