Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' <I>A Dilemma</I> remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siècle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works—his 1881 <I>Against Nature</I>, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891...
