Dedalus European Classics – serie

Mike Mitchell has revised his translation and a new introduction has been added.'A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein's monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama... Meyrink's old Prague — like Dickens's London — is one of the great creation of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious, or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'.Written in 1908, and more or less half way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation. ' Expressionist illustrator Kubin wrote this fascinating curio, his only literary work in 1908. A town named Pearl, assembled and presided over by the aptly named Patera, is the setting for his hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. Culminating apocalyptically - plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street - it is worth reading for its dizzying surrealism alone. Though ostensibly a gothic macabre fantasy, it is tempting to read The Other Side as a satire on the reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early twentieth century, highly prescient in its gloom, given later developments. The language often suggests Nietsche. The inevitable collapse of Patera's creation is lent added horror by hindsight. Kubin's depiction of absurd bureaucracy is strongly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and his flawed utopia, situated next to a settlement of supposed savages, brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World; it precedes both novels, and this superb new translation could demonstrate its influence on subsequent modern literature.'Kieron Pim in Time OutIt will appeal to fans of Mervyn Peake and readers who like the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque in their reading.

"A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the narrator are put into context by the immersion into the Sadeian world of the Torture Garden."The Times'This hideously decadent fin de siecle novel by the French anarchist Mirbeau has become an underground classic. A cynical first half exposes the rottenness of politics, commerce and the petit bourgeois; in the second half, our totally corrupt narrator travels to China and meets the extraordinary Clara. She shows him the Torture Garden, a place of exotic flowers and baroque sadism. There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible.'Phil Baker in The Sunday Times'First published in 1899, the same year as Conrad's Heart of Darkness(which, in a sado-masochistic way, it mirrors), this short tale takes place in a Far Eastern garden in which torture is practised as an art form. Amidst exquisite flowers and gorgeous fauna, bodies are sliced, flayed and prised open with sumptuous artisanal skill,the whole scene rendered in prose as visceral and tender as the action it describes. When the staid realist novels of the mid-20th century have been consigned to the oblivion they so richly deserve, this text will be remembered as a classic.'Tom McCarthy in Esquire

'...reading The Dark Domain by Stephan Grabinski is such a revelatory experience. Because here is a writer for whom supernatural horror is manifest precisely in modernity - in electricity, fire-stations, trains:the uncanny as the bad conscience of today. Sometimes Grabinski is known as the Polish Poe but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not what we expect, but they are principles - rules- and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour.'China Mieville in The Guardian

In Les Diaboliques there are six tales of female temptresses - she-devils - in which horror and the wild Normandy countryside combine to send a shiver down the spine of the reader. First published in 1874 Les Diaboliques caused an uproar and all copies of the book were seized on the orders of the Ministry of Justice as the book was a danger to public morality. Scandal made the book an immediate success. It is now regarded as a classic and is studied in French schools.

The historical novel Marie Grubbe is loosely based on the true story of a Danish noble woman. 17 years old, she married the illegitimate son of Frederik The Third of Denmark and Norway. The relationship was unhappy and violent, and, after she had had several affairs, her husband divorced her, allowing her to keep her substantial dowry. So begins an extraordinary story tracing the life of Marie Grubbe from an adolescent to an old woman.

The Mystery of Sintra road begins when two friends are kidnapped by several masked men, who, to judge by their manners and their accent are men of the best society. One of the friends is a doctor, and the masked men say that they need him to assist a noblewoman, who is about to give birth. When they reach the house, they find no such noblewoman, only a dead man. E‡a de Queiroz wrote this spoof 'mystery' with his friend Ramalho OrtigÆo, publishing it in the form of a series of anonymous letters in the Dirio de Notcias in 1870.

'The greatest book by Portugal's greatest novelist.' Jose Saramago. The Maias is part of Dedalus' project to make all of Eca de Queiroz' major works available in English. Margaret Jull Costa's translation of The Maias won both The Pen and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. According to Publishers Weekly, 'This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction.'

George Sand's fictionalised account of her notorious affair with the poet Alfred de Musset caused a sensation on its publication two years after his death, in 1859. It also prompted a volley of claim and counter-claim: two more novels rapidly appeared in the following months, Lui Et Elle, by Musset’s brother, defending his reputation; and Lui, by Louise Colet, Flaubert’s former mistress and briefly Musset’s. Then the journalists and commentators of the day joined in, with Eux, by Gaston Lavalley, and Eux Et Elles, by Adolphe de Lescure, satirising the whole sordid business.