The Marquis de Sade spent more than half his life in prison, which gave him the excuse to take his revenge on society through evocations of sexual cruelty. Excluded from normal life, he developed an extremist vision of the world through stories, dialogues, and historical novels. Included here are extracts from his major fiction, including Les Cents Vingt Journees de Sodome, Justine, and the compulsively vicious Juliette. Other titles by Margaret Crosland, available from Dufour, include Sade's Wife and de Sade's Crimes of Love.

The story of: the Marquise de Sade is inevitably linked to that of her husband, but Renee Pelagie de Montreuil gains the consideration she never received in her lifetime in this book by "one of the world's most distinguished scholars of Sade's work" -- The Independent. Who was Sade's wife? And why did she love him so devotedly for almost thirty years? Crosland competently shows how the Sade marriage symbolized the decay of the old aristocracy, and conveys the struggle of one individual to establish her personal identity at a time in France when women had virtually no rights of their own.

This fast-moving story takes the reader rapidly along dark paths of sinister events in Le Sentier, the heart of Paris's rag trade. One spring morning a Thai girl is found dead in a fashion workshop. Another unlucky prostitute, or something more sinister? A club is uncovered where people secretly get filmed having sex - including some very distinguished men. This is the seedy underworld of Paris - the traffic in heroin, illegal immigrants without work permits, police officers' secret lives. A Turkish man - a police informer and leader of exploited immigrants rag-trader workers - is also Police Inspector Danquin's lover. This is a gripping morality tale of twentieth-century Paris. Dominique Manotti teaches nineteenth-century Economic History. "Rough Trade", her first novel, was awarded the top prize for the best thriller of the year by the French Crime Writers Association.

This selection of Margaret Crosland's poetry shows her to be worthy of a place among that small circle of English women poets of unassertive but authentic accomplishment--poets like Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ruth Pitter, and Anne Ridler--and like them she has her own quietly distinctive voice. Her poetry is honest, unobtrusively learned, and unpretentious. The title of this book comes from the author's observation that life consists of little else: we meet people, places, jobs, ideas, but they are rarely there forever, there is always a parting, or at least a development in some way. This new collection contains both old favorites, revised for this volume, and new poems.