About this item
The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written - Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom - landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history."Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center,felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild." - Adam McKay, Academy Award-winning filmmakerDescribed as both "one of the most important novels ever written" and "the gospel of evil," 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word "sadism," which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain.
About the Author
Joel Warner is a former staff writer for Westword, Denver's alternative newsweekly, and has also written for Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications. While he's exposed dirty cops and tackled city hall corruption with the best of them, he prefers stories about beer-delivering robots, Shaquille O'Neal's sense of humor, and globe-trotting coffee expeditions gone awry.
His work has been recognized by the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, the Best American Sports Writing anthology, the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, the Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, the Magazine Awards of Western Publishing, and the AltWeekly Awards, among other honors.
A graduate of Haverford College, Warner lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife, Emily, and their two children, Gabriel and Charlotte. According to the vagaries of the Internet, Warner is an international expert on Swine Flu and one of the leading authorities on Casa Bonita, the over-the-top Mexican restaurant made famous by South Park.
