50 decadent courtiers contribute essays, stories, poems, reminiscences, and advice on decadent themes in an anti-lifestyle guide for the modern libertine. Readers can transform the spirit of the age, or failing that, ignore it altogether. Featuring contributions by the bad, dangerous and eccentric free spirits of contemporary society have chosen to be remunerated with Absinthe. Decadence here means a kind of colourfully reckless nonconformism. Nick Groom's essay on Decadent Outcasts, in which he demonstrates how the image of the decadent poet has been appropriated by the modern rock star, is not to your taste, then there is always Louise Welsh planning her own funeral to savour and enjoy - or Mick Brown's analysis of the film Performance, William Napier's guide to Roman Decadence in which he relates that the Emperor Heliogabulus's favourite foods were 'flamingos' brains and the head of parakeets', or Nicholas Royles noirish short story 'The Child', about a man sucked into a Mancunian underworld of cinephiles, sex parties and bent coppers. Maria Alvarez even suggest sthat decadence may turn out to be a little dull. In the end, she says, it becomes 'a state of aestheticised satiety.'

Select guidance on extreme cuisine,gutter beverages,tawdry travel, seedy films, dissolute sex and corrupt individuals. Featuring contributions from the 19th century's anti-heroes - Oscar Wilde,Octave Mirbeau and J.K.Huysmans and the wayward spirits of our age- Hari Kunzru, Nicholas Royle, Louise Welsh, Helen Walsh, Belle de Jour

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

A black feast with offerings from the major practitioners and their precursors in France and England.

"What Nia Simone Bijou desires, she works hard to achieve. Her accomplishments as a respected writer have not only brought her to Hollywood, but she's now poised for worldwide success, and pursued and desired by Prada, a man of international power and wealth. With everything Nia has, she remains restless and on a journey to quell her inner storm. Then someone introduces her to a place called Decadence ..."--Page [4] cover.

A collection of stories and novels from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, decay, and deviance.In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-si cle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mend s, Rachilde, Jean Mor as, Octave Mirbeau, Jos phin P ladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-si cle France.