Marquis de Sade Books In Order

Novels

The 120 Days of Sodom (1782)
Dialogue Between A Priest And A Dying Man (1782)
Justine (1791)
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)
Juliette (1797)
Incest (2013)
The Marquise de Gange (2021)

Collections

The Crimes of Love (1800)
Selected Writings of Marquis De Sade (1954)
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Stories (1965)
Selected Letters (1965)
One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and Other Writings (1967)
Eugenie De Franval and Other Stories (1968)
The Mystified Magistrate (1986)
The Gothic Tales of the Marquis De Sade (1989)
The Passionate Philosopher (1991)
The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales (1992)
The Complete Marquis De Sade: 1 (2005)

Non fiction

Letters from Prison (1999)
The Ghosts of Sodom (2003)
The Charenton Journals (2013)

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Marquis de Sade Books Overview

The 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, po*rnographic 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 Until now, Sade’s masterwork was only available in a tame, outdated translation. 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 preface by Georges Bataille, author of The Story of the Eye.

Justine

If de Sade had submitted the original version of Justine to us from prison in 1791 we would have rejected it, because it is pure sadism, as is to be expected from the original ‘sad*ist’, even though it is wrapped up in philosophy. However, it is now freely available in English as a classic, and has been so for quite a while. This version is simplified rather than toned down, but the actual ages of juveniles have been omitted.. de Sade uses his narrative as a vehicle for expressing his opinions at very great length. This and the obscurity of some passages, and the constant repetitions, makes it difficult for the average reader. Here is an effort to rectify this, an honest attempt to make the essence of a masterpiece more easily available by retelling it without losing the strength or the flavour, and enough of the philosophy is retained to make de Sade’s opinions clear.

Philosophy in the Bedroom

This new Creation Books edition couples this erotic masterpiece with The Lusts of the Libertines, a document taken from 120 Days of Sodom, in which de Sade’s depraved imagination is given free reign to catalogue 447 of the wildest depravities and atrocities he can conceive, from incest and coprophilia through to mutilation, torture and bloody murder. Originally intended to be fleshed out later, their reduction to numbered lists seems to render them even more intense and confrontational. Philosophy of the Boudoir is perhaps the most representative text out of all the Marquis de Sade’s works. In the boudoir of a sequestered country house, a young virgin is ruthlessly schooled in the ways of sexual perversion, fornication, murder, incest and complete self gratification which culminates with the final and most shocking act of liberation carried out on her own mother. Within these pages lies de Sade’s notorious doctrine of libertinage expounded in full and coupled with liberal doses of savage, unbridled eroticism, cruelty and violent sexuality.

Juliette

An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digression. Mlle. De Maupin, Lolita, Candy all pale beside Juliette. Library Journal

Incest

Incest is a chilling tale of sexual experimentation and philosophical exploration carried to its most logical and devastating extreme. Marquis de Sade’s semi autobiographical protagonist, Monsieur de Franval, is rich, handsome, intelligent, and thoroughly immoral. When he marries a pious woman and fathers a daughter, he is determined to educate his progeny to be free. The ultimate proof of his daughter s unfettered liberty? That she become his secret lover. But when the beautiful and accomplished daughter spurns an eligible young bachelor, instead declaring her intention to remain with her father, her na ve and doting mother s suspicions are at last aroused. Confused and distressed by her daughter s behavior, Madame de Franval confronts her husband with tragic results. A challenging and breathtaking masterpiece, Incest is a sober portrait of catastrophe in the midst of excess.

The Crimes of Love

Who but the Marquis de Sade would write not of the pain, tragedy, and joy of love but of its crimes? Murder, seduction, and incest are among the cruel rewards for selfless love in his stories tragedy, despair, and death the inevitable outcome. Sade’s villains will stop at nothing to satisfy their depraved passions, and they in turn suffer under the thrall of love. This is the most complete selection from the Marquis de Sade’s four volume collection of short stories, The Crimes of Love. David Coward’s vibrant new translation captures the verve of the original, and his introduction and notes describe Sade’s notorious career. This new selection includes ‘An Essay on Novels,’ Sade’s penetrating survey of the novelist’s art. It also contains the preface to the collection and an important statement of Sade’s concept of fiction and one of the few literary manifestoes published during the Revolution. Appendices include the denunciatory review of the collection that it received on publication, and Diderot’s vigorous response. A skilled and artful story teller, Marquis de Sade’s is also an intellectual who asks questions about society, about ourselves, and about life. Psychologically astute and defiantly unconventional, these stories show Sade at his best. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up to date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Stories

Simone de Beauvoir in her essay Must we burn Sade?, published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952 and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade’s writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years. He has also been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis in his focus on sexuality as a motive force. The surrealists admired him as one of their forerunners, and Guillaume Apollinaire famously called him ‘the freest spirit that has yet existed’. a selection from the opening of? the essay: ‘Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which was never seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.’ They chose to kill him, first by slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. ‘When the grave has been filled in, it will be sown with acorns so that eventually all trace of my tomb may disappear from the surface of the earth, just as I like to think that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men…
.’ This was the only one of his last wishes to be respected, though most carefully so. The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends; his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as ‘sadism’ and ‘sad*istic.’ His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned the ten volumes of Les Journ?es de Florbelle, at the instigation of his own son his books banned. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on ‘The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century,’ or even on ‘The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century,’ without once coming upon his name. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade’s enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius; they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the ‘divine marquis’ only betrays him. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us. But just what is his place? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original; Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself.

The Mystified Magistrate

The great virtue of this volume is that it reveals a lighter, comic side of Sade. He was a man obsessed, like many great writers, and his obsessions are still present here: his hatred of all things pretentious, his loathing of a corrupt judicial system, his damning of hypocrisy and false piety. One of the great anarchists of all time, he was nevertheless far from mad as many pretended and these works of fiction shed another light on this most feverish of minds. But however heavy the subject, The Mystified Magistrate is infused with a light touch; it is revealing but never offensive.

The Gothic Tales of the Marquis De Sade

Short stories and a novella by the infamous French po*rnographic writer

The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

The name of the Marquis de Sade is synonymous with the blackest corners of the human soul, a byword for all that is most foul in human conduct. In his bleak, claustrophobic universe, there is no God, no human affection, and no hope. This selection of his early writings, some making their first appearance in English in this new translation by David Coward, reveals the full range of Sade’s sobering moods and considerable talents. This is a fully annotated edition including an introduction, a biographical study, and a history of the censorship of these writings. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up to date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Complete Marquis De Sade: 1

Adorned with gripping cover art by Man Ray and translated by renowned scholar Dr. Paul J. Gillette, this dramatic collection of de Sade writings includes ‘Justine,’ ‘Juliette,’ ‘120 Days of Sodom,’ ‘Philosophy In The Bedroom’ and many works often scattered among ‘pastiche’ versions of de Sade’s oeuvre. Free of the author s repetitions, polemics and syntactically complex 18th century phrases, this edition captures the drama of de Sade s forays into human sexuality including such practices as voyeurism, fetishism, and, most famously, sadism. Vilified by critics in the 1800s as ‘Monstrous depraved An odious book by an even more odious man,’ de Sade s depiction of his personal adventures has been studied and enjoyed by readers in light of the 20th and 21st centuries. Readers will also discover a mind as free as de Sade s adventures were uninhibited, for he discusses natural evolution 25 years before Darwin s birth; postulates the existence of the unconscious mind a century before Sigmund Freud; and probes social mores decades before the work of Margaret Mead. He also espouses political ideas that were put into practice by such diverse figures as Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Fidel Castro. Born into French nobility in 1740, Marquis de Sade continues to open minds to new human experience more than 250 years later in this dramatic new release from Holloway House Publishing.

Letters from Prison

The 1990s have seen a resurgence of interest in the Marquis de Sade, with several biographies competing to put their version of his life story before the public. But Sadean scholar Richard Seaver takes us directly to the source, translating Sade’s prison correspondence. Seaver’s translations retain the aristocratic hauteur of Sade’s prose, which still possesses a clarity that any reader can appreciate. ‘When will my horrible situation cease?’ he wrote to his wife shortly after his incarceration began in 1777. ‘When in God’s name will I be let out of the tomb where I have been buried alive? There is nothing to equal the horror of my fate!’ But he was never reduced to pleading for long, and not always so solicitous of his wife’s feelings; a few years later, he would write, ‘This morning I received a fat letter from you that seemed endless. Please, I beg of you, don’t go on at such length: do you believe that I have nothing better to do than to read your endless repetitions?’ For those interested in learning about the man responsible for some of the most infamous philosophical fiction in history, Letters from Prison is an indispensable collection.

The Ghosts of Sodom

The secret journal which the Marquis de Sade worked hard at maintaining, even when ill and aging at the Charenton asylum in France, has been rediscovered and is now published in English for the first time. The Ghosts of Sodom offers a unique insight into the workings of the mind of this aristocratic sad*ist and literary revolutionary. Sade was 67 years old when he wrote this journal one in a series of four, two of which have yet to be rediscovered during his seven years spent at the ‘hospital prison.’ The journal reveals how his days were slow and grim, full of everyday preoccupations, worries about money, nasty quarrels with the people around him but were also lit up by a final erotic adventure: the last flames of his senile passion. At the Charenton asylum, Sade’s death approached, darkening the colors of his life and tearing apart his feelings. The Ghosts of Sodom also includes a selection of Sade’s letters from Charenton, as well as the working notes for his terminal novel The Days of Florbelle. Still a controversial figure two centuries after his death, the Marquis de Sade is increasingly becoming thought of as a significant voice and a man for our times, rather than simply an aristocratic pervert. During his life, he spent a total of 27 years imprisoned on charges of obscenity as he consistently expounded his philosophies of ‘libertinage,’ a manifesto of sexual liberation and dominant theme of his works. Two major feature films based on the life of Sade were released last year.