Penguin Classics Pleasure

Putting the sex back in Pleasure,here is the first new English translation since the Victorian era of the great Italian masterpiece of sensuality and seduction Like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea's pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit. This new translation of D'Annunzio's masterpiece, the first in more than one hundred years, restores what was considered too offensive to be included in the 1898 translation-some of the very scenes that are key to the novel's status as a landmark of literary decadence.

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), a novelist, poet, journalist, dramatist, and daredevil, is the most influential and controversial Italian author of the twentieth century.
Lara Gochin Raffaelli is a professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Alexander Stille is a frequent contributor on Italy to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker and is the author of several books. He lives in New York.