{"title":"Medlar Lucan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"decadent-traveller-book-medlar-lucan-9781873982099","title":"The Decadent Traveller","description":"The Decadent Traveller is a timely antidote to the nightmare world of backpacks, duty-frees and gastro-enteritis. It contains enough excitement and excess to last most armchair travellers their reading lifetime. 'For those unacquainted with Lucan and Gray's act, the pseudonymous pair write in character as two peripatetic Wildean flaneurs, driven by the stylistic flair and pleasure seeking values of the late 19 th century Decadent and Aesthetic movements. Here they travel to Cairo, St Petersburg, Tokyo, New Orleans, Naples and Buenos Aires, sampling en route extremes of excess and perversion, and all the way quoting such fellow travellers as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Crowley, Verlaine and Huysmans.' Oliver Bennett in The Independent on Sunday - Book of the Week Choice 'Readers of their debauched anthologies on cookery and gardening will welcome this clever, tasteless and very funny account of their journey across the globe, following in the footsteps of Flaubert and Aleister Crowley amongst others.' Andrew Crumey in Scotland on Sunday 'A piece of travelling kitsch, a camp description of the authors' lives on the road to cheer the heart of all those jaded readers who criticise the travel book for its lack of surprise. Following the success of their Decadent offerings on cookery and gardening, the lusty lunatics are exiled from their beloved Edinburgh and head east, armed with an unlikely set of quotes from the likes of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Absurd and erotic anti-travel writing at its best.' Anthony Sattin in The Sunday Times Books of the Year","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49513229451537,"sku":"GOR001330295","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51376795255057,"sku":"GOR014246124","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53230811545873,"sku":"GOR003949446","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1873982097.jpg?v=1751412668"},{"product_id":"decadent-gardener-book-medlar-lucan-9781873982822","title":"Decadent Gardener","description":"There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: 'In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should be allowed to fall into decay and ruin.'Gardening, Lucan and Gray believe, is 'little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty', and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that'nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden.' For them the garden is a place of 'agony, self-doubt and betrayal.' They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener.And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned.The book abounds with piercing, pricking truths.The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns.The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes.Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs(they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49578700407057,"sku":"GOR001385562","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50148888707345,"sku":"CIN1873982828G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054596489489,"sku":"NIN9781873982822","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51324175122705,"sku":"CIN1873982828A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1873982828.jpg?v=1751061069"},{"product_id":"decadent-cookbook-book-medlar-lucan-9781568582696","title":"The Decadent Cookbook","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49613944258833,"sku":"GOR004477579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49644687360273,"sku":"GOR003825415","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49788436513041,"sku":"CIN1568582692G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1568582692.jpg?v=1751309458"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-medlar-lucan.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}