120 Days of Sodom

The 120 Days of Sodom is the most extreme book in the history of literature. The Marquis de Sade narrates the escalating sex-crimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a four-month, precipitous orgy of sodomy, coprophagia and rape leading inexorably towards torture and human decimation. A masterpiece of black humour, pornographic to a point of excess and aberration never reached by any other writer, and required reading for anyone looking for the seminal origins of contemporary culture's fascination with cruelty and violence, The 120 Days of Sodom is the first and ultimate literary outrage. It also stands as the first attempt by an author to collate a systematic psychopathology of human sexual disorder, pre-dating Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis by a century. Until now, Sade's masterwork was only available in tame, outdated translations. This new, uncensored and more complete version of The 120 Days of Sodom brings the work back to incendiary life, returning it to the streamlined status of the revolutionary, raw work Sade had intended. Unbearable, unforgettable, violent, cruel, blasphemous, obscene: The 120 Days of Sodom is a unique and addictive detonation of the senses for the discerning 21st century reader. With a foreword by Georges Bataille, author of The Story of the Eye.