"She means more to me than a sister, mother, friend, or even a lover, and for that reason, she is no lover; in a word, I love her too much to desire her..." More 20-year-old Jean-Jacques love story: Here, his "mother" and perpetual comforter spark a strangely compromised...

"The smallest and most insignificant pleasures within my reach attract me more than all the pleasures in heaven." It's the young, hero-worshiping Jean-Jacques again -- his display of emotional immaturity leads to his mischievous antics in the company of passers-by and outsiders, always...

"I did that too; that's what I thought; that's how I am." Rousseau's vast and sometimes haunting dossier on the self is one of the most compelling and boldly introspective works ever written. Some readers may resent his embarrassing descriptions of wallowing in humiliation and fiasco, as...

The title seems to promise a vivid depiction of horror. These paragraphs don't make up a huge part of the whole. The hastily produced circumstances made the work a lucrative piece of sensationalist journalism, even though it was published in a more intellectually respected institution—the London...

"He believed in his happiness, in this attraction he felt in himself—a force so irresistible that all women succumbed to it." Maupassant's gripping tale of the rise of an unscrupulous journalist, while firmly set in 1880s Paris, could be updated to the 1960s, the Reagan-Thatcher era, or...

Pope's On Man is a masterpiece of incisive generalization, which can be well summarized as a joyful exploration of the status of human beings in the vast chain of life. Each of the poem's four letters takes a different perspective, connecting man to the universe, as an individual, to society, and...

Here is the riveting epigraph to an early 1884 translation of Huysmans' cult novel, often referred to as the Bible of Decadence. An accurate description of this bizarre masterpiece that has resonated in high and low culture ever since. Against Nature (or Against the Grain in this edition) explores...

After the outlandish textual antics of "Thandy," the book seems worthy of a literary health warning. Sure enough, it opened up a mid-dialogue on a topic that was never explained; it meandered through a hundred pages, so to speak, before disappearing mid-sentence—that is, a plotless novel...