Bruges-La-Morte (Atlas Press)

Bruges-La-Morte, originally published in 1892, was immediately acknowledged, by Huysmans and Mallarme among others, as one of the greatest achievements of the Decadent movement in French literature. Ostensibly it is the account of a doomed love affair which culminates in a bizarre murder. As important, however, is its dream-like evocation of the "dead city": Bruges, a city of silence, ennui and of desolation, whose "shadows lengthen across the text", and which dictates the inevitably fatal events of the narrative.A peerless poetic novel in a fine contemporary translation which has been carefully revised, this edition also reprints the photographs chosen by the author to illustrate the first edition.