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Against Nature (Against the Grain)
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.
Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual - deeply cultured and well-read - can no longer bear contemporary Parisian life in any of its forms! As a youth he had experienced the monastic environment and later academic life, but, remaining unfulfilled, he immersed himself in the multifarious sensual pleasures so readily available in Paris.
Still deeply unsatisfied, he decides to move to a house in a village in the countryside. Here he can create his own controlled environment with a minutely designed interior supporting his particular artistic tastes. At last he can live alone with his books, his reflections, and his needs. Nothing will interfere with how he wants to live, what he wants to see, to read, to study, to smell, to eat. However, a life of such total personal indulgence, even on a lofty intellectual and artistically sensitive plane, proves anything but easy - or satisfying.
The character of Des Esseintes, intense, testing, infuriating, but astonishing, was said to have been influenced by the famous aesthete of the time, the Comte de Montesquiou (also a model for Baron de Charlus in Proust's In Search of Lost Time), while Against Nature makes an unmistakeable appearance in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nicholas Boulton here reads one of the best early translations (published anonymously and originally titled Against the Grain), which has been revised to reinstate sections originally cut to protect sensibilities of the time. It is the full novel as Huysmans intended.
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This volume features William F Harvey's original undead hand story "The Beast with Five Fingers" that sparked many movies including Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead". Poe's classic "The Tell Tale Heart" is joined by Lovecraft's creepy tale of alienation "The Outsider", and a chilling Dickens ghost story "The Signalman".
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Excellent stories and wonderful performance
- By Gavin Lees on 10-12-18
By: Charles Dickens, and others
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Death in Venice
- A New Translation by Michael Henry Heim
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Simon Callow
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.
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Brilliant gem
- By L. Fish on 09-18-04
By: Thomas Mann
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis - translator
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.
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Ironic, humorous, and restrained
- By Esther on 05-13-13
By: Gustave Flaubert, and others
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Les Miserables
- By: Victor Hugo
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 57 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story, Les Miserables follows Jean Valjean, originally an honest peasant, who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family. A hardened criminal upon his release, he eventually reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and town mayor. Despite this, he is haunted by an impulsive former crime and is pursued relentlessly by the police inspector Javert.
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one happy insomniac
- By Kathryn on 01-27-05
By: Victor Hugo
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Perfume
- The Story of a Murderer
- By: Patrick Süskind, John E. Woods - translator
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the slums of 18th-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift - an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects. Then one day, he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume" - the scent of a beautiful young virgin.
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This is an unusual, highly entertaining story.
- By Kay Tracy on 02-13-19
By: Patrick Süskind, and others
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
- By: Oscar Wilde
- Narrated by: Russell Tovey
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A disturbing tale of a young man's uncanny ability to remain both young and beautiful while descending into a life of heartless debauchery, The Picture of Dorian Gray was considered proof of both Wilde's genius and his perversion. Oscar Wilde's scandalous best seller of 1891 was one of the most damning pieces of evidence used against him in the trial that brought about his downfall.
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A twisted tale of vanity and poisonous people
- By Shantastic on 10-02-19
By: Oscar Wilde
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Les Miserables
- By: Victor Hugo
- Narrated by: David Case
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Abridged
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Les Misérables emphasizes the three major predicaments of the 19th century, each symbolized by a major character: Jean Valjean represents the degradation of man in the proletariat, Fantine represents the subjection of women through hunger, and Cosette represents the atrophy of the child by darkness.
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TOO Abridged, Read Only if You Won't Read More
- By Syd Young on 02-03-14
By: Victor Hugo
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The Great God Pan
- Esoteric Classics: Occult Fiction
- By: Arthur Machen
- Narrated by: Shea Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Machen's novella The Great God Pan is often cited as one of Lovecraft's most notable influences. In it, Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this "seeing the great god Pan". After much study of the human mind, he devises an experiment that involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakens she is terrified and mentally crippled.
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classic horror
- By Shantee on 05-04-16
By: Arthur Machen
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The Scarlet Letter
- By: Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Narrated by: Kate Petrie
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the most important novels in classic literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter tackles the subject of adultery, with the notorious Hester Prynne at the forefront of the scandal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the beginning of the novel, Hester is serving time in prison for having a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a scarlet A on her clothing at all times, so she cannot run from her sin no matter where she goes.
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missing the introductory???
- By Savannah on 05-20-20
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Jane Eyre
- By: Charlotte Brontë
- Narrated by: Thandiwe Newton
- Length: 19 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Following Jane from her childhood as an orphan in Northern England through her experience as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Charlotte Brontë's Gothic classic is an early exploration of women's independence in the mid-19th century and the pervasive societal challenges women had to endure. At Thornfield, Jane meets the complex and mysterious Mr. Rochester, with whom she shares a complicated relationship that ultimately forces her to reconcile the conflicting passions of romantic love and religious piety.
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Perfect!!
- By Amazon Customer on 04-21-16
By: Charlotte Brontë
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The Masque of the Red Death
- By: Edgar Allan Poe
- Narrated by: David Ian Davies
- Length: 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Prince Prospero invites several dozen of the local nobility to his castle for protection against an oncoming plague, the Red Death. Prospero orders his guests to attend a masked ball and, amidst a general atmosphere of debauchery and depravity, notices the entry of a mysterious hooded stranger dressed all in red.
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mediocre
- By Krystal on 10-20-17
By: Edgar Allan Poe
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What listeners say about Against Nature (Against the Grain)
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-04-20
Not what I hoped for
Decent storyline, hard to follow at times; certain parts could have been expanded on to make it much better such as the case with the boy Augustin, likely more impactful on the society of it's own time.
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- Jeffrey Kaufman
- 10-09-24
staggering detail
A wonderful but an exhausting book to read. Thank goodness the audible reader/actor was was quite brilliant and more than up to the task. Thank you.
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- Stephen Zelnick
- 04-16-21
perfection
elegant and luscious can't imagine a better rendering of this work of sour luxury
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1 person found this helpful
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- John Rothermel
- 09-13-22
Great novel
Very funny black comedy. Really enjoyed it. Excellent reader.
Hard to imagine a novel with one above-the-title character being ambitious, but A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is ferociously ambitious.
It is also ferociously funny. Jean Des Esseintes, the last excretion of an exhausted noble family, decides to turn his back on society and spend the rest of his life in refined aesthetic self-distraction, isolated far from his old haunts of Parisian debauchery.
Each chapter is an acidic thumbnail of his ambitions and what comes of them: interior decoration, a homemade liquor organ, the pet tortoise, his book collecting habits. He recalls fondly some old escapades with a woman trappeze artist and a female ventriloquist, neither of whom could fulfill desires, no matter how carefully he spelled them out.
His dining room is remodeled into a ship's galley, with authentic fixtures and window art. Tired of the materiality of the country, he orders imitation flowers, gets rid of them and imports exotic species that look like raw meat from an anatomy class. (Perhaps this suggested the carnivorous garden plants on TV's "The Addams Family"?)
When Des Esseintes decides to make his own scent, he nearly ashyxiates himself.
Then it's off to London to savor the Dickensian atmosphere he has been reading about when not studying lithographs of flayed Christian martyrs. Except he only makes it to an English bodega in Paris, then decides physical journeys aren't worth it. So he goes home.
Goes home and quickly binds up his digestive system with quack snake-oil remedies. A local doctor prescribes three enemas a day, which turns out for Des Esseintes to be a sublime aesthetic experience. He decides to create an enema menu from which to order his meals.
Sadly for him and the reader, his local doctor makes him go back to Paris. Prescription: rejoin the human race before you outsmart yourself to death!
A Rebours is a very funny novel. Anyone who ever daydreamed about being able to afford to just stay home will appreciate its macabre and lugubrious drollery.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mark Hedden
- 06-13-17
An excellent reading of the Decadent classic
I had previously read Á Rebours some years ago, and picked up this audio as a refresher for a project I'm working on. The novel retains all of the unsettling force I remembered. The translation used is very subtle, and Mr. Boulton's reading is fluent, precise, and artful, without showiness or excessive flourish.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Lacy
- 06-25-17
Good performance
Nice performance of the Havelock Ellis translation. I would like to see more Nicholas Boulton performances of classical works. He has that kind of voice that is commensurate with British works of the nineteenth century.
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5 people found this helpful