When I set out to write a book about the natural history of breasts, I knew I'd have to answer some awkward questions about my book topic. At a...
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The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Appolinaire as "the freest spirit that has yet existed," wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systemic exploration — a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud — of the psychopathology of sex, it it considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935.
In addition to The 120 Days of Sodom, this volume includes Sade's "Reflections on the Novel," his play Oxtiern, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay "Must We Burn Sade?" and Pierre Klossowski's provocative "Nature as Destructive Principle."
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