Bøker av Pierre Louys

A manuscript of obscenely erotic poetry from Pierre Louÿs, written in secret and published after his deathBy turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs' Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louÿs' secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase "I do not like to see...," Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own ever-growing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he "disliked" witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains, collected here, conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near-hypnotic obsession.

A novel about obsessive love initially published in France in 1898. Has inspired five film adaptations, including Josef von Sternberg's in 1935 and Luis Bunuel's in 1977.

A collection of seven mildly erotic "pastel" stories, based mostly on mythology, originally published in limited editions in Paris between 1893 and 1898. Pierre Louÿs retells these legends so beautifully that, under the spell of his relation, one almost loses sight of the extent to which their consummate literary craftsmanship reveals the master of literary technic no less than the imaginative artist. The pastels are not so sensational as some of the author's other works but, in a general sense, they are the most delicate and the most sympathetic of all his writings. Pierre Louÿs, pseudonym of Pierre Louis (1870-1925), was a French novelist and poet who expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection. Louÿs frequented Parnassian and Symbolist circles and was a friend of the composer Claude Debussy. He founded various literary reviews, notably La Conque in 1891. His Chansons de Bilitis (1894), prose poems about Sapphic love, purporting to be translations from the Greek, deceived even experts. Aphrodite (1896), a novel depicting courtesan life in ancient Alexandria, made him famous and it became the best-selling work by any living French writer (350,000 copies).