Best known in the English speaking world for his book Le Feu Follet, which has been adopted into several films, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle considered the semi-autobiographical Gilles to be his greatest work.

The literary critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Gilles “is, without any doubt, one of the greatest novels of the century—and one of those books in which the disarming sincerity of a man rises to the grandeur usually reserved to literary transpositions.”

Blood and Oil in the Orient is the story of Lev Nussimbaum, a young Azerbaijani nobleman, and his mad flight across Asia to escape the Bolshevik terror sparked by the Russian Revolution.

Full of picturesque descriptions of the different people he met and the stories he heard, Blood and Oil in the Orient is a kaleidoscope view of the old east, as it is brought to a close by the waves of violence and revolution that come crashing down around it.

Harukichi Shimoi was a professor at the University of Naples. A lover of Dante, he moved to Italy in order to learn Italian so he could read the Divine Comedy in it’s original language.

Stirred by the great patriotic sentiment of pre-war Italy, Shimoi accompanied the elite Italian Aridit troops during the First World War. The Italian war as seen by a Japanese is an epistolary novel comprised of several letters written during his time at the front.

Written in 1889 at Francavilla al Mare, and published the following year by Fratelli Treves, The Child of Pleasure is Gabriele d’Annunzio’s first novel.

The Child of Pleasure tells the story of a young nobleman, Andrea Sperelli, who is in love with Elena Muti, a married woman. When a duel lands him in the hospital, he meets another woman Maria Ferres. Torn between the two women, Andrea attempts to court both of them. Much of this novel was inspired by d’Annunzio’s real life expeirences.

As a member of the French Parliament, Alexis de Tocqueville took it upon himself to become France’s foremost expert on the Algerian question. To this end, he studied the history and people of Algeria, visited the country several times, and undertook a study of both the Islamic religion and Arab language.

In a series of letters and reports to the French Establishment, Tocqueville describes a sort of conceptual travelogue, describing first a brief outline the of the country, it’s inhabitants, their histories, and then describing more explicitly…

Mafarka the futurist is the story of Mafarka-el-Bar, an African warlord who overthrows his oppressive uncle in a violent civil war. Set in an imagined nation in an imaginary Africa, Mafarka weaves a surreal orientalist tapistry of heat, filth and lust from which emerges the titular Mafarka, a true futurist hero who’s superhuman struggle to reinvent the world in his image eventually leads him to his greatest, final act: the birth of a mechanical winged over-man to transcends humanity itself.