Satan Wants Me

SCB COPY Seraphita The story revolves round the angelic and mysterious hermaphrodite Seraphita who seems to inspire love in all she meets. One of Balzac's most unusual novels which will appeal to lovers of the mystical and the supernatural Seraphita will be my master stroke. One can create a Goriot every day but one creates a Seraphita only once in a lifetime. Honore de Balzac Never di Balzac approach the very ideal of Beauty as in this book. Theophile Gautier Honore Balzac (1799-1850) studied law but in 1819 he abandons his legal studies and begins writing . He was a prolific author and in 1839 he begins to think of La Comedie humaine, a grandiose structure which will bring together all the novels he has written and many which he is contemplating for the future. Dedalus published two of the most unusual books in La Comedie humaine, both written in 1834, Seraphita (which includes Louis Lambert and The Exiles) and The Quest of the Absolute. Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize:Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008. His biography of Gustav Meyrink:Vivo:The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008. Satan wants me 'Irwin is a writer of immense subtlety and craftmanship, and offers us a vivid and utterly convincing portrait of life on the loopier fringes of the Sixties. Satan Wants Me is black, compulsive and very, very funny.' Christopher Hart in The Daily Telegraph 'Irwin's writing is witty and scabrous but it is also subtle in a way that keeps catching the reader out. The blend of the fantastical with the philosophical has been the defining characteristic of Irwin's fiction and in Peter's drug-drenched, satan-haunted diary, it has found its perfect expression.' Tom Holland in The New Statesman