Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Dover Thrift Editions) - Softcover

De Quincey Thomas

 
9780486287423: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Dover Thrift Editions)

Synopsis

Impressive account ― admired for its introspective penetration and journalistic astuteness ― of author's early years as a precocious student of Greek and Latin, his adventures among the outcasts and prostitutes of London, studies at Oxford University, introduction to opium in 1804 and his longterm involvement with the drug.

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Review

"Among the best essayists of the romantic era... De Quincey may be viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he might with a stretch even be seen as an ancestor of the J.G. Ballard...turn immediately to this excellent, detailed and often harrowing biography" (Washington Post)

"Thomas de Quincey was the original cosmonaut of inner space, his Confessions of an English Opium Eater predating the wave of drug buddy literature from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh by half a century or more" (Glasgow Herald)

"A stimulating cocktail: exotic dream-sequences conjured up in baroque prosepoetry, camp Gothic effects worthy of Hammer Horror, classical quotations, London street-slang and sprawling footnotes on German philosophy. De Quincey served up this heady concoction of high-culture and low-life in all of his finest writings... At his best, however, he is one of the finest English prose stylists for sheer variety and opiumtinted vividness" (Mail on Sunday)

"The first - and still is the finest - literary dope fiend" (Guardian)

"It is one of the classics of 19th-century life writing and its influence is still felt" (Observer)

Book Description

The original drug memoir - a true nineteenth century account of the pleasures and pains of addiction

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