Bücher von Jean Lorrain

Errant Vice, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the key compositions of the Decadent Movement. A blackly comic novel starring Count Wladimir Noronsoff, the last of an accursed branch of a Russian aristocratic family, this is arguably the most outrageous of Jean Lorrain's works, with a richness of perversity and a quasi-imperial craziness in which the Côte d'Azur is an arena where echoes of Byzantium resound.This is a novel of fascinating moral and artistic complexity which, with its horror and sadness, humor and tragedy, is the climax of the author's career.

No other writer of the fin-de-siècle period undertook a more elaborate exploration of perversities and abnormalities than Jean Lorrain, and no one else went as far afield in the search for discoveries of that curious kind than he did. Perhaps, given the variety of human behavior, it was not possible for him actually to invent perversities that no one actually practiced, or were even tempted to practice, but what is certain is that no one ever examined the anatomy of eroticism, including its wilder extremes, with a greater analytical fervor.In this, the second collection of short stories by Jean Lorrain to be made available in English, exquisitely translated by Brian Stableford, psychological studies of amorous perversity are presented together with mock-folktales, giving further evidence of the amazing inventiveness and imagination of one of the key figures of the Decadent Movement.