Horror of Life – The Suicide Letters
of Charles Baudelaire
Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Eugene Thacker
In the summer of 1845, a young, wayward, and disaffected Charles Baudelaire made a suicide attempt, writing letters that were to constitute his last will and testament. It was to be one of several suicidal crises which would punctuate Baudelaire’s life over the next twenty years, acutely documented in his correspondence, where the themes of depression, debt, and death come together to delineate a life that was lived, in almost every way, against life.
Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire brings together a selection of Baudelaire’s letters that spans his life as a writer, from the scandal and notoriety of The Flowers of Evil, to the images of urban decay depicted in Paris Spleen, to his dossier on the ‘artificial paradises’ of hallucinogens, to the essays on the mal du siècle of 19th century modernity, to his late fragments of misanthropic autofiction, and his final days as a convalescent, disease slowly eroding both body and mind.
A delirious mixture of confession, indictment, and abdication, these letters document Baudelaire’s own dark night of the soul, a spiritual itinerary saturated with the hues of catatonic depression, a pervasive existential dysphoria, and the always-looming allure of death.
Edited, translated and with an introduction by Eugene Thacker
Artworks by Martin Bladh
Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak
Out 8th December 2024
Pre-sales start on 16th November
Hardcover, 180 pages, 190 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-915908-08-7
About the authors
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, and translator. Born in 1821, he was a lifelong inhabitant of bohemian Paris, where he came into contact with a number of artists and writers of his day. His 1857 poetry collection The Flowers of Evil caused a sensation when it was tried for obscenity by the French government. He wrote numerous essays on modern art, literature, urbanism, drug use, and the culture of modernity, in addition to translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He died in 1867, having suffered from aphasia and partial paralysis.
Eugene Thacker is an author, editor, and translator. His books include Infinite Resignation and In the Dust of This Planet. He teaches at The New School in New York City.