Bücher veröffentlicht von Sunny Lou Publishing

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).