Confessions of an English Opium Eater

De Quincey’s account on opium consumption is perhaps one of the earliest books on drugs addiction, before Charles Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels. It seems that De Quincey started taking laudanum to relieve a stomach condition. The drug did not affect him negatively at first; on the contrary, it im......more

I sometimes seem to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. —Confessions . . . I do not believe that any man, having once tasted the divine......more

Opium-Eater is great but it's the rest of the writing here that really captured me. Suspiria de Profundis is a sublime work: its architecture as tortuously digressive and intricately labyrinthine as a Piranesi etching, its mosaics of dreamlight poetry haunting and beautiful like nothing else. De Qui......more

For the right audience this will be an interesting read. For me there was not enough about what brought me to this book. In giving Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Kindle Edition) 3 stars I find myself trying to justify at last a 4th. The style is too much o......more

I imagine this was once the ultimate literary car crash. And people rubbernecked even in the 19th century, which as far as I know did not have radial tires. But there have been so many truly gnarly drug slave narratives since the publication of this once "shocking" book (go Burroughs go!) that this......more