- Published: 18 March 2013
- ISBN: 9780099528593
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 144
- RRP: $22.99
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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- Published: 18 March 2013
- ISBN: 9780099528593
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 144
- RRP: $22.99
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
The original sensationalist, and the best druggy writer, is still Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) first mixed the now-familiar cocktail of despair, self-loathing and romance... De Quincey stands accused, by his own generation and many since, of glamorising addiction and corrupting the impressionable, a charge borne out by his influence on such writers as Poe and Baudelaire, the Symbolists, Decadents and Beats, and so on down to Will Self
Daily Telegraph