The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) may speak of the carnal, depraved, and decaying in human life and the city, but Charles Baudelaire's poetry so infuses even the most grotesque with beauty and a kind of innocence that the reader is moved beyond the rubric of the sacred and profane, into sublimity. This new edition, which features the English translation by F.P. Sturm and W.J. Robertson, also includes artwork by Lester Banzuelo.

In the seventh volume of the Flowers of Evil readers are sent to a completely new time and locale. Takao and Sawa have been forcibly separated. Takao is now living in suburbs of the big city. His parents have new lives in a small apartment and their past for the most part has been forgotten. Now and then little cracks appear in that facade but for the most part they are playing their roles to become a normal happy family. Takao is in a new school; your average model student. And while he is just as awkward, Takao has made some friends and is even occasionally being asked to be social as a new high school student. Even more intriguing is the fact that Takao might have already found himself someone to open up to. Like Sawa this person can see that there is more to Takao than meets the eye. But in this case it is her who reintroduces him to literature.

Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Artist Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), whose Russian Jewish family settled in Manhattan in 1912, was devoted to painting people in their everyday urban lives. He came to be known especially for his representations of city workers and the down-and-out, and for his portraits of himself and his friends. Although Soyer never identified himself as a "Jewish artist," Samantha Baskind, in the first full-length critical study of the artist, argues that his work was greatly influenced by his ethnicity and by the Jewish American immigrant experience. Baskind examines the painter's art and life in the rich context of religious, cultural, political, and social conditions in the twentieth-century United States. By promoting an understanding of Soyer as a Jewish American artist, she addresses larger questions about the definition and study of modern Jewish art. Whereas previous scholars have defined Jewish art simply as art produced by people who were born Jewish, Baskind stresses the importance of an artist's cultural identity when defining ethnic art. As Baskind explains how Soyer negotiated his Jewish identity in changing ways over his lifetime, she offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting Jewish art in general. Her analysis of Soyer's work places the artist in a necessary context and provides a valuable new approach to the study of modern Jewish art.

This text presents documents drawn from the artistic archives of Eastern and Central Europe during the second half of the 20th century.