Dedalus Ebooks: 136 books

Select guidance on extreme cuisine,gutter beverages,tawdry travel, seedy films, dissolute sex and corrupt individuals. Featuring contributions from the 19th century's anti-heroes - Oscar Wilde,Octave Mirbeau and J.K.Huysmans and the wayward spirits of our age- Hari Kunzru, Nicholas Royle, Louise Welsh, Helen Walsh, Belle de Jour

The Fiery Angel is one of the great achievements of modern Russian literature, as powerful and revolutionary as its contemporary, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. In a vividly atmospheric recreation of the occult underworld of sixteenth century Germany, during an age of Inquisition,...

A new translation by an award winning translator rescues this work from being out of print in English. Goethe�s collection of stories (1795) is modelled on the Decameron. A family of German nobles have been forced from their home on the left bank of the Rhine by the French Revolution. Their peace...

n the Spring Sonata, while in Italy, Bradomin is a young man who falls in love with a young girl destined to become a bride of Christ. To get over his unhappy love affairs, in the Summer Sonata Bradomin goes to Mexico but gets embroiled with a Yucatan princess married to a bandit-king. 'Each of the...

The chapter headings say it all: Corruption and Decay; Blood, the Vital Ingredient;The Gastronomic Mausoleum; and I Can Recommend the Poodle. This is a not a normal cookbook but a slightly sinister and highly literate feast of decadent writing on food. There are dishes from the tables of Caligula and...

Confessions of a Flesh-Eater is the story of a grand passion - man and meat, and the intimate relationship between them. 'Set in the present, the tale has all the grim foreboding of a genuine Gothic work. Its tone and emphasis owe much to James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Mary Shelley's...

J.-K. Huysmans� Stranded (En Rade 1887), published just three years after the iconoclastic Against Nature, sees him again breaking new ground and pushing back the boundaries of the novel form. Stamped throughout with his characteristic black humour, Stranded is one of Huysmans� most innovative,...

Gray's reworking of the Animal Farm concept brings in a post-Thatcherite twist. Having peacefully co-existed with his friends Mouse and Rat (the latter carries a briefcase and wears Italian suits), the Cat's owners suddenly leave him to fend for himself. He then has to fall back on feline instincts,...

A baroque extravaganza from the author of Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf which will delight his readers. The young hero awakes to find himself on a train with Dr Freud from Vienna and the sadistic train attendant Malkowitz. He can't remember who he is nor where he is going and has certainly no idea why he...

The False Ambassador is a circular journey through a world just emerging from the Middle Ages, forced by war and discovery into new ways of living and thinking. ''Beginning in 1428, this swashbuckling romp recreates a brutal medieval world on the cusp of civilisation. Despite his scholarly inclination,...

The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound...

I Malavoglia is one of the great landmarks of Italian Literature. It is so rich in character, emotion and texture that it lives forever in the imagination of all who read it. What Verga called in his preface a 'sincere and dispassionate study of society' is an epic struggle against poverty and the elements...

'Lawrence's translations of Verga's Sicilian short stories are classics in their genre, perfectly capturing their cunning fusion of artlessness, austere detachment and skilfully engineered spontaneity as well as retaining something of that lofty style for which Verga's Italian contemporaries so admired...

This volume contains the long novella Sparrow and five stories never previously translated into English: Temptation, The Schoolmaster, The Devil's Hand, The Gold Key and Comrades. A great read for anyone interested in Sicily and Southern Italy. Verga is the master of the short-story form. 'Giovanni Verga...