Nihilists Idolaters and Murderers
Explore Nihilists, Idolaters, and Murderers—a curated reading list of dark literary classics. Discover existential works by Zola, Céline, and Dostoevsky, plus profound philosophical texts from Cioran and Baudelaire.
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Fathers and Sons
by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Fathers and Sons is one of the greatest nineteenth century Russian novels, and has long been acclaimed as Turgenev's finest work. It is a political novel set in a domestic context, with a universal theme, the generational divide between fathers and sons. Set in 1859 at the moment when the Russian autocratic state began to move hesitantly towards social and political reform, the novel explores the conflict between the liberal-minded fathers of Russian reformist sympathies and their free-thinking intellectual sons whose revolutionary ideology threatened the stability of the state.
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Germinal
by Emile Zola
The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope. Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all. New translation Includes introduction, suggestions for further reading, filmography, chronology, explanatory notes, and glossary
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.
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Paris Spleen, 1869
by Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"
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The Maimed
by Hermann Ungar
Called by Thomas Mann a "sexual hell" as well as "pure artistry," The Maimed is set in Prague and relates the story of a highly neurotic, socially inept bank clerk who is eventually forced to have sexual relations with his widowed landlady. At the same time he must witness the steady physical and mental deterioration of his lifelong friend who is suffering from an unnamed disease. Part psychological farce, Ungar tells a dark, ironic tale of chaos overtaking one's meticulously ordered life. Having died young, Ungar wrote only two novels, in addition to a handful of plays and short stories; this is the first time his work has appeared in English.
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A Short History of Decay
by Emile M. Cioran
The author confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history. He focuses on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, & science.
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Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre
by Arthur Rimbaud
The classic influential poems by Rimbaud, in a bilingual en face edition featuring acclaimed translations by Louise Varése.
