Against Nature
1884 · 242 pages
Des Esseintes, the last of a spent aristocratic line, retreats to a house outside Paris filled with perfumes, poisonous flowers, and a jeweled tortoise. Wilde and the English aesthetes read it as scripture.
★ 6.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
A Season in Hell
1873 · 103 pages
Nine sections of prose delirium in which Rimbaud, eighteen years old, arraigns his ancestry, his damnation, and his own attempt to derange the senses into vision. Modernism starts in this voice.
★ 7.0
The Collected Poems
1939 · 544 pages
Irish myth and fairy tale at the start, then old age, politics, and desire handled with frightening force. Yeats wrote things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and a terrible beauty is born.
★ 9.1