RJ Dent Books

 A Victorian shipwreck transforms a mother’s love into a desperate fight for survival, forcing an unthinkable choice between morality and life. Two survivors: Mary Sheldon and her infant son, cling to the slick surface of an overturned lifeboat drifting on an unforgiving ocean. Days pass with no food or water. As Mary watches her child grow weaker, she feels her mind fracturing from thirst and hunger. To save herself, she must do the unimaginable. 

A novel by RJ Dent

 With its blending of dark eroticism with ethical nihilism, Eugenie de Franval is arguably one of the Marquis de Sade’s most shocking stories.  RJ Dent’s new translation of Sade’s challenging and provocative masterpiece, Eugenie de Franval, reveals how easily the path of excess leads inevitably to destruction. 

 Charles Baudelaire’s most famous work is his masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil (1857), which shocked the nineteenth-century French literary world with its outspoken descriptions of lesbian sex, drug taking, and prostitution, as well as depictions of lost innocence due to the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city.  

 Fanfarlo is Charles Baudelaire’s only novella, first published in 1847, ten years before the publication of The Flowers of Evil. 

  The Young Enchanter is a story of two friends who travel the world looking for a woman who has vanished without a trace. Their travels take them around the world and eventually to an isolated Turkish temple where they find dangers, deadly rituals and an answer to the mystery of the missing woman.  

 A Season in Hell is Arthur Rimbaud’s extended poem of damnation. 

Illuminations is a collection of forty-two prose poems that provide a clear example of Rimbaud’s visionary sensibility. 

The Drunken Boat is generally regarded as Rimbaud’s most important poem. It has had a significant influence on modern poetry.  

 As strange, unsettling, and memorable as The Seed, The Bridges is a remarkable novel which carries with it all the compassion, human insight, and lyrical power of all of Tarjei Vesaas’s novels. It describes the changing relationships between three teenagers—a young mother who has drowned her newborn child, and Aud and Torvil, a teenage couple who befriend her. Their individual reactions to the tragedy and their efforts to communicate with each other form the central theme of The Bridges. 

 The Seed is set on a small, idyllic-seeming Norwegian island which is visited by a stranger during a particularly hot summer. After a young girl is murdered, the stranger is blamed and hunted down by the islanders. The Seed convincingly portrays the collective madness of a lynch mob and the later collective shame of every individual. Tarjei Vesaas’s taut, spare prose exposes the guilt and mistrust – and the inevitable attempt at expiation that follows every act of violence. 

 ‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ was Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s second Surrealist collaboration - their first being ‘Repetitions’, a poetry collection.  The publication of ‘Misfortunes of the Immortals’ in 1922 coincided with the transition of Dadaism to Surrealism in Paris.  

 Most of the poems and prose pieces in Scattered Leaves were written by René Crevel in 1924, eleven years before he committed suicide. Consequently, Scattered Leaves was first published posthumously in French. Scattered Leaves contains some of Crevel’s most personal and poignant poems. It also foreshadows his death.   

 Incunabula presents a new modern English translation, by the acclaimed translator and writer R J Dent, of André Breton’s ‘The Surrealist Manifesto’, a work whose influence on the artistic world of its time was enormous and whose repercussions are still perceptible anywhere that artists and free-thinkers raise the flag of revolt.  

 Soluble Fish (1924) by André Breton is a sophisticated poetic novel which is one of the first works of Surrealism, and with the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), began the new literary movement which followed Paris Dada in the decade of the 1920s. This is the first translation of this important surrealist work since 1969. 

 The Dead Man, (originally published as Le Mort), is Georges Bataille’s classic tale of devotion, depravity and damnation. It follows Marie, who, after witnessing the sudden death of her lover, wanders naked and grieving through the night streets of a French town, sinking ever deeper into depravity as she seeks to escape the agony of loss…  The Solar Anus (L'anus Solaire) is a short surrealist text, written by Bataille in 1927. It deals with death, decay, disasters, impotence, ennui and excrement, and contains references to the sun - which brings life to the Earth, and death to those exposed to its unrestrained energies.  

 Constantly portrayed as the reclusive spinster, the dressed-in-white Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson has always been regarded as the epitome of American Victorianism… However, during her lifetime she wrote poems full of erotic imagery, many dealing explicitly with the subject of sex. Dickinson adopted a series of sexual personae to write poems that explored themes of sexuality. Emily Dickinson’s Sexual Personae is an in-depth study of the transgressive nature of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. 

Revelation is the story of a married woman who agrees to fulfil one of her husband’s sexual fantasies – only to discover that a beautiful gift can become a malevolent curse. After one act of decadent abandon, she is drawn into a maelstrom of emotional devastation that threatens to destroy everything she holds dear, leading her to make the ultimate sacrifice… 

 The author of 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom, was also a remarkably astute and insightful literary critic. The Marquis de Sade’s essay, Some Thoughts on the Novel, written in 1800 while he was imprisoned in the Bastille, shows that he truly appreciates and understands the genre he excelled in.