Hourmaster is a novel about evil, the passage of time, and the dissolution of a society - France in the seventeenth century. In his palace in a city vanquished by the years, the Duke Gonzaga lives consumed by his deep boredom and his passion for young girls. Time passes as marked by the more than two hundred clocks situated throughout the palace. Needing a new hourmaster, Gonzaga employs Arturo to be the keeper of the palace's time-pieces. Arturo - called Gog - also becomes the Duke's friend and for a time alleviates Gonzaga's boredom as they share the nightly clock-keeping rounds. There...

First published in 1977, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work--a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.

E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable....