Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The supreme value of his testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to reexamine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man." Simone de Beauvoir
Review
"Justine is the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination." Napoleon Bonaparte
Review
"Shines a perverse and revealing spotlight on the entire era of the French Revolution....An important and elucidating book." Robert Lowry, Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Sade remains a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure." Newsweek
Synopsis
This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine.
Description
No other writer has so scandalized society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka is indisputable. This volume contains the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine; Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; and Eugenie de Franval, a novella widely considered a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.