This book is the fifth original fiction collection from one of the true eccentrics of modern British writing - stories that blend erudite skill and a startling emotional intensity, classical elegance and unexpected experimentation, sophisticated miserablism and innocent beauty. A fairy tale as dark as they come amid a shattering clash of two opposing and poisoned personalities. A Meyrink-tinged dream of atavism and Italy that awakens the dreamer to philosophy and fate. A quiet and perfectly observed journey through the far reaches of Japan. Myth-working fantasy haunted by the motley ghosts of...

Vehicle for warped desire or major contribution to the modern novel, The Cutest Girl in Class steals the prosthetic hand of modern existence, gloves it in the leopard-skin of amazing style and idiom, and then proceeds to slap modern existence in the face with its own stolen hand.

Zak is a man who likes to play with dolls - Real Dolls. Clive is a boy longing for Marybeth, the girl next door. Now their disparate streams of lust and longing are about to cross, thanks to Thad, an aspiring, almost heartbreaking criminal, and Clive's father, whose obsession with "inorganic women"...

This is the second in the series of poetry collections that began with -September. Once again, adapting the Japanese tanka form, Quentin S. Crisp presents a poetic and aphoristic journal of season, mood, observation and introspection. Both a scrapbook of a writer's working process and a marshalling of new combinations of subject matter through an update of old forms, October is a further attempt by the author to close the gap between the time-taking, record-keeping distance of the written word and the immediacy of the living moment.