This novel is a story of two working-class sisters, but the main protagonist is Paris, suburban Paris, the Paris of railway stations, cheap restaurants and cafe-concerts, and the passages that describe the music-halls and crowds of the Avenue de Maine and the Boulevard Saint Michel have a visual immediacy."

The Novelist Durtal is disgusted by the emptiness and vulgarity of the modern world. He seeks relief by turning to the study of the Middle Ages and begins to research the life of the notorious 15th-century child murderer, sadist, necrophile, and practitioner of all the black arts - Gilles de Rais. Through his contacts in Paris Durtal finds out that Satanism is not simply a thing of the past but alive in turn of the century France. He embarks on an investigation of the occult underworld with the help of his lover Madame Chantelouve. Durtal's preoccupation with Gilles de Rais's lascivious brutalities begets in him the urge to find out if similar satanic practices are still performed; so he persuades Madame Chantelouve to take him to the house of a notorious renegade priest named Canon Docre. Together they witness there the celebration of a Black Mass, and few finer descriptions of this obscene ritual have ever been written. French Victorian Gothic as its best.

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Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-sicle novel anticipating many strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarm and Poe. A novel like no other, it features a hero, des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by two silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes, embarking on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell.

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' "The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show, these "Parisian Sketches share the Impressionist fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, the exuberant Paris of the Opera Garnier and the Folies-Bergers. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, "Parisian Sketches is an assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed literary impressions--of cafe concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny 'City of Light'--"Parisian Sketches recreates Paris with an intimacy and immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.

One of the first French novels to tackle the subject of prostitution, this story centres on would-be actress Marthe who lives in one of the lowest dives in Paris and her ultimately doomed relationship with Leo, a romantic searching for something to take place of lost illusions."