The Necrophiliac

For more than three decades, Lucien ' one of the most notorious characters in the history of the novel ' has haunted the imaginations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the astounding protagonist of Gabrielle Wittkop's lyrical 1972 novella, The Necrophiliac, has never appeared in English until now. This new translation introduces readers to a masterpiece of French literature, striking not only for its astonishing subject matter but for the poetic beauty of the late author's subtle, intricate writing. Like the best writings of Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire, Wittkop's prose goes far beyond mere gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.

Fiction. NECROPHILIA VARIATIONS is a literary monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses and death. It consists of a series of texts that, like musical phrases, take up the theme and advance it by means of repetition, contrast, and variation.Written in a style that ranges from the lugubrious to the ludicrous--from purple prose to black humor--NECROPHILIA VARIATIONS uses literary means to probe the psychopathology of sexual perversion. Eros, the book asks, is naturally drawn to beauty, and yet nothing would seem to be less inherently beautiful than a cadaver. How is it that a necrophile ends up confusing the two, discovering beauty in what most people would find repugnant? How does he come to desire that which would seem to be intrinsically undesirable? If you have ever contemplated the curious points of contact between eros and thanatos, then Necrophilia Variations will be sure to delight you with its depictions of death, desire, and deviance.

From the author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes a thrilling and chilling novel that bestselling author Peter Straub says serves as a “guidebook to hell.” To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese-American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of the New Orleans French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. Exquisite Corpse confirms Brite as a writer who defies categorization. It is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.

In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--"present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins." Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an "intellectual alliance," given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

"Poetic musings on a life well-lived—one that is still moving forward, always creating, always luminous. This isn't your typical autobiography. Garfunkel's history is told in flowing prose, bounding from present to past, far from a linear rags-to-riches story." —Bookreporter "It's hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that's more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been." —The Wall Street Journal "A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wildly imaginative . . . A highly intelligent man trying to make sense of his extraordinary life." —Associated Press From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel, a memoir (of sorts)—moving, lyrical impressions, interspersed throughout a narrative, punctuated by poetry, musings, lists of resonant books loved and admired, revealing a life and the making of a musician, that show us, as well, the evolution of a man, a portrait of a life-long friendship and of a collaboration that became the most successful singing duo in the roiling age that embraced, and was defined by, their pathfinding folk-rock music. In What Is It All but Luminous, Art Garfunkel writes about growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s (son of a traveling salesman, listening as his father played Enrico Caruso records), a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a redbrick semi-attached house on Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. He writes of meeting Paul Simon, the kid who made Art laugh (they met at their graduation play, Alice in Wonderland; Paul was the White Rabbit; Art, the Cheshire Cat). Of their being twelve at the birth of rock’n’roll (“it was rhythm and blues. It was black. I was captured and so was Paul”), of a demo of their song, Hey Schoolgirl for seven dollars and the actual record (with Paul’s father on bass) going to #40 on the charts. He writes about their becoming Simon & Garfunkel, ruling the pop charts from the age of sixteen, about not being a natural performer but more a thinker, an underground man. He writes of the hit songs; touring; about being an actor working with directors Mike Nichols (“the greatest of them all”), about choosing music over a PhD in mathematics. And he writes about his long-unfolding split with Paul, and how and why it evolved, and after; learning to perform on his own . . . and about being a husband, a father and much more.

In this town, I'm free from shameA place where everyone knows my nameGlamorizing corpses to feed a needThat's why they call me Skeleton KingThey all worship me, but they don't know the real meAll they see is my painted faceTruth is, I'm terrified, all the hope inside me diedDeath and cold will forever be my morbid fateThen she showed me something moreSomehow stealing death's allureTrigger Warning: This book contains many triggers and this warning should be taken seriously. The sexual and graphically depicted scenes in this novel are not for the squeamish and will be disturbing for some readers.

"Queer, dirty, insightful, and so funny" (Andrea Lawlor), this coyly revolutionary debut story collection imagines new origins and futures for its cast of unforgettable protagonists—almost all of whom are named Sarah. FINALIST FOR THE GOLDEN POPPY AWARD FOR FICTION NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2021 BY THE MILLIONS * OPRAH MAGAZINE * LAMBDA LITERARY * ELECTRIC LITERATURE * REFINERY29 * COSMO * THE ADVOCATE * ALMA * PAPERBACK PARIS * WRITE OR DIE TRIBE * READS RAINBOW In Sarahland, Sam Cohen brilliantly and often hilariously explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, both demanding and thrillingly providing for its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself. In one story, a Jewish college Sarah passively consents to a form-life in pursuit of an MRS degree and is swept into a culture of normalized sexual violence. Another reveals a version of Sarah finding pleasure—and a new set of problems—by playing dead for a wealthy necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah uses fan fiction to work through romantic obsession. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives. Readers witness as the ever-evolving "Sarah" gets recast: as a bible-era trans woman, an aging lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. While Cohen presents a world that will clearly someday end, "Sarah" will continue. In each Sarah's refusal to adhere to a single narrative, she potentially builds a better home for us all, a place to live that demands no fixity of self, no plague of consumerism, no bodily compromise, a place called Sarahland.

An autobiographical novel that reads more like an exorcism than a novel. In terse and lucid prose, Zurn traces the roots to her obsessions: the exotic father whom she idolized, the impure mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described 'the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.' Dark Spring is the story of a girls's simultaneous initiation to sexuality and madness, revealing a dark side of the 'mad love' so championed and romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists.

Exemplary Departuresconsists of five exquisitely wrought novellas depicting five "exemplary" deaths in various exotic locations around the globe: a gentleman spy disappears with his secrets into the Malaysian jungle; a young woman agonizes atop a ruined castle overlooking the Rhine; a writer succumbs to alcoholism in the streets of Baltimore; a salesman expires as a vagabond in the sewers of New York; and hermaphroditic twins are assassinated in a stagecoach. Drawing from the remnants of real-life anecdotes--from Edgar Allan Poe's final days to the agonizing tale of Idilia Dubb--these stories are imagined descents into death's supreme indifference. A true modern inheritor of the legacy of the French Decadent writers, Wittkop spins these tales with her trademark macabre elegance and chilling humor, maneuvering in an uncertain space between dark Romanticism, Gothic Expressionism and Sadean cruelty. "Death is life's most important moment," Wittkop claimed; Exemplary Departuresoffers five particularly important moments for the English reader's delectation. First published as a set of three novellas in 1995, this translation is of the 2012 edition of five novellas, which include the previously unpublished "Mr. T.'s Last Secret" and "Claude and Hippolyte."