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The Desperate Man (first published in 1887) is arguably the French decadent novel par excellence of the 19th century. It is also Léon Bloy¿s first novel and a seminal work which, as such, planted the seeds of just about every other important theme or topic that the author would later develop in subsequent works throughout his life and career. Life is rain water for talented writers; and habitual poverty for Bloy acted as the mulch.There is in The Desperate Man the seed of satire, which was actually a small tree by the time The Desperate Man came out, the seed having been sprouted earlier in his career, in the articles for newspapers, predominantly the Chat Noir journal, - such satire as to rival Jonathan Swift¿s; there is also the seed of apocalyptic Catholicism in The Desperate Man, and the nuts of the exegeses of commonplaces, not to mention the germs of the blood of the poor; there is the kernel of the constant attack on contemporaneous clergy and Bloy¿s self-professed fondness for cenobitism. There is the spore of the eulogy for sainthood, and the embryo of the denunciation of the proxenetism of the press, Parisian high-society and the bourgeoisie. There are the negative grains of anti-Republicanism, and anti-German sentiment. There are the positive grains of pro-conservativism, pro-Medievalism, pro-Monarchy, and pro-Merovingian French Dynasty.

Meditations of a Solitary in 1916 was written by Léon Bloy in 1916 in France, during World War I, and published in 1917, the same year that the author passed away. The themes are mostly theological, with sustained meditations on both the Christian soul and the lack of soul of Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany. Indeed, although biographical in nature, one might consider this less a follow up to On the Threshold of the Apocalypse in the Ungrateful Beggar series and more a companion piece to The Soul of Napoleon, but in a Bizarro sort of way, with a candidate alternative title of The Bizarro Soul of Wilhelm II, or Wilhelm II¿s Lack of Soul, - such was the rage, frustration, contempt, sadness, heart-rending compassion of the author at the time of writing."How to accuse Wilhelm alone? That fellow at best is nothing more than an imbecile, as frightening an imbecile as you like, but an imbecile all the same...""¿So,¿ someone asks me, ¿what remains?¿ Absolutely nothing but the Eucharist in the Catacombs and waiting for the unknown Liberator whom the Paraclete must dispatch, when the blood of countless torture victims and the tears of some elect will have sufficiently purified the earth... God is preparing to start over again... the fulfillment of that apocalyptic prophecy is near."

Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne: 1900-1904 by Léon Bloy (originally Quatre ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne) is the third diary in the Ungrateful Beggar series.The autobiography, edited for publication, covers four years in the artist¿s life after he and his family moved back to France from Denmark, to Lagny on the Marne, about 40 kilometers outside Paris. It runs the gamut from gut-wrenching grief and sorrow, as the family lives on the edge of utter poverty while constantly being harassed by creditors and landladies; to full outrage against the pettiness, avarice, and hypocrisy of the bourgeois and wealthy; to uplifting praise for God for all that is adorable in life in spite of the suffering; to out-and-out satire and comicalness that will make the reader laugh before he can dry the tears."Terrible day! The lack of wine and fortifying alimentation, the threat of a lack of coal, the human certitude of being unable to feed our children tomorrow, the impossibility of continuing to live here and the impossibility of escaping, the apparent abandonment of everyone and the evident hostility of so many people; finally, and above all, that infinitely dolorous expectation of a liberator who never comes; all that together puts us two steps away from despair. While we stiffen our wills, our house is shaken by a tempest and the sky is sad like death without God. For whom then do we suffer thus?"

Dark Minerva by Giovanni Pascoli was first published in 1898. (The original title in Italian is Minerva Oscura.) It is an impassioned, often poetic, but also scholarly and critical investigation into Dante Alighieri¿s Divine Comedy. As Pascoli says in the Prolegomena, "To know and to describe Dante¿s thought, will it ever be possible? He eclipses in the profundity of his thought: he intentionally eclipses. I have already set my heart on following him in one of those disappearances in which, after having said ¿Look,¿ he immediately leaves us in the dark. This time I said to myself, if I see, I will always see; if I understand him in this place, I will understand him everywhere else."Giovanni Pascoli (AD 1855-1912) was a poet and Italian classical scholar, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and also English. He was a student of Giosuè Carducci, the Italian classicist poet and Nobel prize winner.

What is Fascism is a collection of essays, newspaper articles and interviews, discourses and polemics on the subject of fascism by Giovanni Gentile (AD 1875-1944), the "philosopher of Fascism." The collection was written (or spoken and later transcribed) over the course of several years prior to its publication in book format, in 1925, under the Italian title of Che cosa è il fascismo.Trained as a philosopher, Giovanni Gentile spent many years as an academic, writing books and teaching. He held multiple posts as professor of philosophy, at various Italian universities including the University of Rome. Later, he served as the Minister of Public Education during the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. His major contribution to the history of philosophy includes his own brand of absolute idealism, or new-Hegelianism, known as "actual idealism."Readers new to Gentile, or to fascism in general, may be surprised, if not shocked, depending on their political leanings, to understand how close fascism is or was to the liberalism of the 19th century. "Seeing that, in part, fascism is liberalism: at least the liberalism of men who sincerely believed in freedom, and had however an austere concept of it... liberalism, as I understand it and as the men of the glorious Right of the Risorgimento understood it, the liberalism of freedom in the laws and consequently in the strong State and in the State conceived of as an ethical reality."

Isaiah's Sunglasses is a beautifully illustrated, fictional rhyming story, that begins with Isaiah as an infant and chronicles his journey through high school. Blind and always wearing his yellow-rimmed sunglasses, we get a glimpse into Isaiah's life, his determination, his family, his friends, and how he discovered and learned to use his voice. This book is designed to help navigate critical conversations with young children as they learn more about people with disabilities, accept and respect differences, embrace inclusion, and begin to develop anti-bias behaviors.

The Words of a Demolitions Contractor (originally Propos d'un Entrepreneur de Démolitions), published in 1884, is a collection of articles written by French author Léon Bloy, previously published in the columns of various Parisian journals between the years 1882 and 1884 - the Chat Noir journal principally, but also the Gils Blas, the Figaro, the Nouvelle Revue, and Le Petit Caporal. Selected by the author himself, they represent Léon Bloy at his earliest and fiery best as a thunderous, irascible, intransigent Catholic pamphleteer and polemicist. These are the articles that earned him his reputation, and these are the articles that essentially torpedoed his career. So maligned and hated was he from the start, that his reputation as an author still suffers. But as the dust settles after nearly 150 years, in retrospect, Léon Bloy stands out as a beacon of righteousness, a Parisian Diogenes, shedding the light of his genius and rancor on the ills plaguing Paris and France at the time - during the Belle Epoque and the years leading up to the two world wars.It is hard to discover a writer of such intensity, love and disgust, pathos, anger, and parody - in any language, at any period of time, in the history of Western literature. Imagine the gloom and despair of Dostoevsky, mixed with the prophesy and thunder of an Old Testament prophet, throw in the biting wit of Jonathan Swift - shake it up and let it sit for a minute - and there you have him: Léon Bloy.

Fanchette's Pretty Little Foot (originally Le Pied de Fanchette in French), a novel by Restif de la Bretonne, was first published in 1769. The story is a cross between the fairytale Cinderella, from 1697, and Samuel Richardson's moral story (actually libertine novel) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, from 1740. Now, Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper was originally a folktale dating back at least 2000 years ago to a similar tale from Greece or Egypt, but it was made famous in the modern era (at least for Western audiences) with the 17th-century publication of French writer Charles Perrault's version of the tale, and more recently still by the 20th-century release of Walt Disney's animated movie. ¿But one does not have to be a scholar of French fairytales, Hollywood movies, or 18th-century English libertine novels to appreciate this simple, but delightful tale about a young and virtuous bourgeois girl, the daughter of a wealthy fabric merchant, whose parents die while she's still a teenager, leaving her to fate's fortune in then-naughty Paris. She is pretty as a belle [sic] and even more virtuous, but it is her prettier little foot in especial that gets her into all kinds of trouble. Who would have thought that a girl's foot, embellished by a rich slipper, could be so attractive and seductive? Leave it to the French to capitalize on that. Or leave it to Restif de la Bretonne in this charming story, which is really a comedy, to bring it front and center. Interestingly, this novel was the first to give a name to a sensual preference called shoe fetishism, or "retifism" in French (after the author's name).

Written and published in 1884, Léon Bloyʼs The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification is an attempt by the author to renew the Cause for Canonization of Christopher Columbus. This is part one of that work. It includes a preface by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly. To read this book today feels sometimes like reading a book written only yesterday. Christopher Columbus represents the West and Western Civilization as no other person before him can or ever will. And everyone else, intra or extra muros, those who do not subscribe to that civilization but inherit all its benefits - they are the angry, ingrateful hordes some of whom, quite clearly, do not know what they do, nor what their actions imply. Léon Bloy says it best when he says: "The prejudice against Christopher Columbus is so tenacious and so strong that the greatest poet in the world, supposing him inspired by the most magnificent of all indignations, would never succeed in overcoming it.""Doubtless also, he had to believe that that captive world would not be handed over to him without a fight and his heroic soul counted on the God of the oppressed to decide his fortune. But the extraordinary injustice, the unprecedented ingratitude, the indefatigable persistence of misfortunes as he had never seen before and, above all, the supernatural, absolute, implacable insuccess of all his efforts - with the exception of the Discovery, - that there must have strangely astonished his soul, which was unique among the unique!"