Against Nature (à Rebours) - New Translation by Robert Jordan Gaudet: (Hermes Publica Classics)

Withdrawn from society and devoted to beauty, excess, and artifice, the aesthete Des Esseintes creates a private world of rare perfumes, exotic flowers, and elaborate sensations. But in fleeing ordinary life, he discovers that the mind can be a more perilous wilderness than the world outside. Against Nature is J.K. Huysmans’s hypnotic masterpiece of decadence—a landmark novel of the fin-de-siècle and one of the defining books of modern aestheticism.