"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard's narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard's first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of "indirect communication." The Seducer's Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard's attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her. Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

Johannes is an aesthete, dedicated to creating the possibility of seduction through the careful manipulation of young women. He stealthily pursues the innocent Cordelia until she becomes increasingly drawn to him. But when she is ready to give herself completely, she realizes she may have got everything wrong. United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love�s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love�.

Diary of a Seducer records Johannes's discovery of a girl with the Shakespearean name Cordelia, whom he sets out to control. Intricately, meticulously, cunningly, the seduction proceeds. No detail is too small to escape Johannes. "She sits on the sofa by the tea table and I sit on a chair at her side. This position has an intimate quality and at the same time a detaching dignity." Less erotic than an intellectual depiction of seduction, Diary of a Seducer shows the casuist Kierkegaard in what he characterized as the aesthetic mode. A new introduction by Michael Dirda puts this influential novella into high relief.

Chronicles Kierkegaard's intellectual and spiritual development through selected writings.

In this “enormously accomplished and compelling novel,” a man crisscrosses Scandinavia to solve the mystery of his wife’s death—and of his own life (Paul Auster, bestselling author of 4 3 2 1). Jonas Wergeland, a famous TV documentary producer with an almost magical knack for infidelity, returns one evening from the World’s Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, and an endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hairsbreadth escape from a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland’s life provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.

Accessible guide to Kierkegaard available serving as a reference to students and non-specialists.

A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy “Maybe all women wonder what men would be like without their posturing, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling...” – Dodie Bellamy This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous – not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency. The novel – a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy – changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.