E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history--focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science--in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, "A Short History of Decay" dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.

'Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.' In The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran grapples with the major questions of human existence: birth, death, God, the passing of time, how to relate to others and how to make ourselves get out of bed in the morning. In a series of interlinking aphorisms which are at once pessimistic, poetic and extremely funny, Cioran finds a kind of joy in his own despair, revelling in the absurdity and futility of our existence, and our inability to live in the world. Translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard, The Trouble With Being Born is a provocative, illuminating testament to a singular mind.

"A Lover's Discourse," at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's "Werther "to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, "A Lover's Discourse "artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

In 1790, while serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852) was punished for dueling and placed under house arrest for forty-two days. The result was a discursive, mischievous memoir Voyage Around My Room, and its sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. Admired by Nietzsche and Machado de Assis, Ossian and Susan Sontag, this classic book proves that sitting on the living-room sofa can be as fascinating as crossing the Alps or paddling up the Amazon. In addition to the Voyage and Expedition, this edition also includes the dialogue "The Leper of the City of Aosta," a preface by Xavier's better-known older brother (the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre), and an introduction by Richard Howard.

In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience.

"A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone's hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison."--"The New Yorker"
"In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."--"Publishers Weekly"
"No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."--"Boston Phoenix
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First published in 2002, Clinical Pain Management is a comprehensive textbook for trainee and practicing specialists in Pain Management and related areas, presenting readers with all they need to know to provide a successful pain management service. This major clinical reference work comprises four volumes. Three clinical volumes deal respectively with all aspects of Acute Pain, Chronic Pain and Cancer Pain; from the basic mechanisms underlying the development of pain, to the various treatments that can be applied in different clinical situations. The fourth volume, Practic and Procedures, complements these by providing helpful advice on practical aspects of clinical management and research, including protocols and established clinical guidelines, making it a ready-reference manual for the busy clinician. Innovative features such as evidence scoring and reference annotation are incoproated for ease of reference, and the text is supported throughout with plentiful illustrations and numerous tables. New for this second edition, there is a companion website containing chapters and illustrations from the four volume set. Written and edited by a large team of acknowledged international aspects, the fully updated second edition of Clinical Pain Management remains an authoritative and comprehensive guide to this growing specialty and is an invaluable addition to the bookshelves of anyone training or working in the field of pain management.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time -- the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain."

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre -- philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist -- holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. La Nausee, his first and best novel, is a landmark in Existential fiction and a key work of the twentieth century.

In this collection of aphorisms and short essays, E.M. Cioran sets about the task of peeling off the layers of false realities with which society masks the truth. For him, real hope lies in this task, and thus, while he perceives the world darkly, he refuses to give in to despair. He hits upon this ultimate truth by developing his notion of human history and events as "a procession of delusions," striking out at the so-called "Fallacies of Hope." By examining the relationship between truth and action and between absolutes, unknowables, and frauds, Cioran comes out, for once, in favor of "being."

"In the sentence 'She's no longer suffering, ' to what, to whom does 'she' refer? What does that present tense mean?" --Roland Barthes, from his diary
The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. For nearly two years, the legendary French theorist wrote about a solitude new to him; about the ebb and flow of sadness; about the slow pace of mourning, and life reclaimed through writing. Named a Top 10 Book of 2010 by "The New York Times" and one of the Best Books of 2010 by "Slate" and "The Times Literary Supplement," "Mourning Diary" is a major discovery in Roland Barthes's work: a skeleton key to the themes he tackled throughout his life, as well as a unique study of grief--intimate, deeply moving, and universal.

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principal preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other characters' actions as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind. The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.
The Temptation to Exist first introduced this brilliant European thinker twenty years ago to American readers, in a superb translation by Richard Howard. This literary mystique around Cioran continues to grow, and "The Temptation to Exist" has become an underground classic. In this work Cioran writes about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, about mystics, apostles, philosophers. For those to whom the very word "philosophy" brings visions of arduous reading, be assured: Cioran is crystal-clear, his style quotable and aphoristic.

"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning"--"The Washington Post"

Nadja, André Breton’s most frankly autobiographical book, is the quintessential Surrealist romance. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a uniquely magical perspective.

The core of Nadja is Breton’s complex relationship with an unpredictable and unconventional young woman, ‘the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration’. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton both spins one of the most unusual love stories in modern literature and illustrates the notion of ‘petrifying coincidence’, a cornerstone of Surrealist thought.

First published in 1928, Nadja has long been regarded as the most important and influential work to emerge from Surrealism. This edition features Richard Howard’s masterful translation and a new introduction by Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti that details the circumstances of the book’s composition.

Is it possible to die a happy death?
This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Algerian, Mersault, who defies society's rules by committing a murder and escaping punishment, then experimenting with different ways of life and finally dying a happy man.

Roland Barthes's last book, combining a selection of photographs with reflections on photography. It begins as as an investigation into the nature of photographs, and then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind.

Barthes investigation into the meaning of photographs is a seminal work of twentieth-century critical theory. This is a special Vintage Design Edition, with fold-out cover and stunning photography throughout. Examining themes of presence and absence, these reflections on photography begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs - their content, their pull on the viewer, their intimacy. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind. He was grieving for his mother at the time of writing. Strikingly personal, yet one of the most important early academic works on photography, Camera Lucida remains essential reading for anyone interested in the power of images. 'Effortlessly, as if in passing, his reflections on photography raise questions and doubts which will permanently affect the vision of the reader' Guardian

The bilingual, illustrated, and National Book Award-winning edition of Charles Baudelaire’s masterpiece. The complete French text is accompanied with an English translation by Richard Howard. Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time. In “Spleen et idéal,” Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish—of sexual and romantic love. “Tableaux Parisiens” condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city’s soul and praises the city’s anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. “Le Vin” centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of “Fleurs du Mal” while rebellion is at the heart of “Révolte.” The voice of Baudelaire lives in this award-winning edition that includes monotypes by artist, Michael Mazur. “Howard’s achievement is such that we can be confident that this Fleurs du Mal will long stand as definitive, a superb guide to France’s greatest poet.”—The Nation

During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities - a distant relative, an orderly and a jockey who had an affair with his wife - remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death. A groundbreaking work, for which Claude Simon devised a prose technique mimicking the mind's fluid thought processes, The Flanders Road is not only a masterpiece of stylistic innovation, but also a haunting portrayal - based on a real-life incident - of the chaos and savagery of war.

Dubbed "Nietzsche without his hammer" by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as "On the Heights of Despair" and "Tears and Saints," "The New Gods" eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran's favorite themes, "The New Gods "explores humanity's attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In "Paleontology" Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while "The Demiurge" is a shambolic exploration of man's relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, "The New Gods "reaffirms Cioran's belief in "lucid despair," and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran's near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books.

Scott Cairns has carefully preserved every poem he's ever published that he cares to preserve. He's also added previously unpublished work, spanning three decades. A careful introduction by Gregory Wolfe and tribute preface by Richard Howard make this the ultimate collection of Cairns' work.