Peter Owen modern classics

"Urien's Voyage is an allegorical account of a sea voyage. From the stagnant, teeming waters of the Sargasso to the frozen Arctic, Gide charts in prose the fantastic journey of the Orion and the sexual and moral transformations of those aboard. The temptations, suffering and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with an extraordinary profusion of detail, yet the pilgrims can never be sure of the reality of their experiences." "The eponymous Urien is, we now know, the young Andre Gide himself. Written under the spell of the great French Symbolist poet Mallarme, the novel is an illustration of both the techniques and the aesthetic credo of the Symbolist movement." "Although written early in the career of this key French thinker and Nobel Prize-Winner, Urien's Voyage is now regarded as a significant work, articulating the powerful tension between sexuality and morality that would preoccupy Gide in his better-known later novels."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of over 200 limericks with the author's original illustrations and nonsense songs and stories.

"Jacques Forestier, the central character of Cocteau's famous first novel from 1921, is a parasite and dilettante who responds readily to beauty in both sexes." "Leaving his provincial family he comes to Paris to study for his degree. Indulging in a life of dissipation with a group of students and their mistresses, he falls in love with Germaine, a chorus girl kept by a rich banker. The affair, doomed from the start, forces Jacques to come to terms not so much with society as he finds it but with himself."--Jacket.

Marceau and Ange Jason, two brothers tied by love after a harsh upbringing, suffer their downfall in a struggle for dominance resulting in sibling rivalry gone terribly awry.

In an isolated farmhouse in the Jura, Claudine awaits her husband Renaud's return from a Swiss sanatorium. She distracts herself by encouraging her young friend Annie to recount salacious episodes from her love life. When Renaud's homosexual son Marcel arrives, Claudine sets about matchmaking, a fiasco she bitterly regrets. With Renaud's death, Claudine's ennui is transmuted into resigned suffering. But she gradually allows the rhythm and beauty of the natural world to reawaken her desire to live. Retreat From Love, first published in 1907, was the first of Colette's novels to be written without the collaboration of her husband 'Willy', from whom she had recently separated.

Set in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting and uncompromising in its characterizations. Exploring once again the dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures -- recurrent themes of Paul Bowles's writings -- The Spider's House is dramatic, brutally honest, and shockingly relevant to today's political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere.