This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. "A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."-- Washington Post "An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."--Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including On the Heights of Despair , also available from the University of Chicago Press.