this book is brilliant. it captures perfectly the obsession of the french decadent movement with the female and what the male will do to control "woman." I will not give away any details of the story, but i must say the female as vampiric, hysterical, and simply put, sick, is what the character of thomas edison in this novel tries to put an end to by making his own version of "the female" that will be better suited to the world and society, but actually selfishly, to the needs of the male, and in particular mr. edison in the novel. it is a brilliant novel and i recommend THE DECADENT READER, from which i read this novel, it contains more unknown and unfortunately unread literature from this extremely fascinating movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

This little known novel is a masterpiece of Decadent literature (a brief movement localized in France around the turn of the last century that was influenced mainly by the poetry of Baudelaire and the theories of evolution put forth by Darwin). It tells the story of a fictionalized Edison who builds a female cyborg to exist in place of the unattainable love object of a tortured young man. She is animated by the spirit of a ghost and has the appearance of a Venus statue. Villiers, in the decadent tradition, lauds artifice above "nature," writing characters who traverse the world of illusion as that which is more real than real, a world in which appearance and the material are everything. This book might be of particular interest to feminists: Villiers only writes women as artifical beings, hysterics, ghosts, objects of fetishism. This book is a must read for any one interested in metaphysics and the rhetoric of "image" versus "being."

This book contains short stories from some of the greatest minds in SF, Including a Dorsi novela that appears no where else. Quite simply a must for all warriors of the future.

This anthology of Delta Green short stories presents a good introduction to the conspiracy/horror concepts of the DG world. Some stories are better than others, and each tale has it's own merits, but the story by Arinn Dembo stands head and shoulders above the rest. The story, a DG-flavored explanation of the life and times of a rockstar who closely resembles Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, is truly fantastic in my opinion. I'm probably a bigger fan of the story because of the unsolved mystery of Cobain's death, but it's well-written and sucks you in with a mixture of present-time and flashback sequences. I recommend the book as both an introduction to DG, and as a source of fresh new historical fiction authors.

In my studies of Ulysses, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Dubliners, I found this book to be an extremely handy reference guide. Adams covers thematic concerns, allusions and motivations of Joyce. These brief discussion on each of the works of Joyce include enough information to set the reader in the same direction. Yet, at the same time, Adams keeps each section short enough so that it is manageable for the reader to consult as a quick reference tool. For example, the section on Ulysses is only 45 pages long. It is too bad this book is out of print; something should be done to get it reprinted. This book would be an excellent guide for anyone studying Joyce.

It was for school so I kinda had like absolutely no choice BUT 2 read it