Antonin Artaud’s novelised biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, HELIOGABALUS is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, the book shows Artaud at his most lucid as he assembles an entire world-view from raw material of insanity, sexual obsession and anger. Artaud arranges his account of Heliogabalus’s reign around the breaking of corporeal borders and the expulsion of body fluids, often inventing incidents from the Emperor’s life in order to make more explicit his own passionate denunciations of modern existence. No reader of this, Artaud’s most inflammatory work – translated into English here for the very first time – will emerge unscathed from the experience. Translated by Alexis Lykiard and with an introduction by Stephen Barber (author and cultural historian).

'Buy the book; it's very entertaining.' David Aaronovitch, The Times A Financial Times, BBC History and Spectator Book of the Year On 8 June 218 AD, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy, egged on by his grandmother, led an army to battle in a Roman civil war. Against all expectations, he was victorious. Varius Avitus Bassianus, known to the modern world as Heliogabalus, was proclaimed emperor. The next four years were to be the strangest in the history of the empire. Heliogabalus humiliated the prestigious Senators and threw extravagant dinner parties for lower-class friends. He ousted Jupiter from his summit among the gods and replaced him with Elagabal. He married a Vestal Virgin – twice. Rumours abounded that he was a prostitute. In the first biography of Heliogabalus in over half a century, Harry Sidebottom unveils the high drama of sex, religion, power and culture in Ancient Rome as we’ve never seen it before.

Satire written on a lark by Mencken, with assistance from friend and co-editor Nathan, to prove to themselves how easy it was to write a successful play. Of it Mencken wrote in 1937: ... "the hero should be a man universally disreputable, and ... there should be nothing in the play save time-honored theatrical buncombe. Every sort of novelty in the plot was to be barred, and the so-called psychology was to be as transparent as possible."

"Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts" is a book written by Mencken and his co-editor friend George Jean Nathan to show how easy it was to write a play. The book tells the story of Heliogabalus, Emperor of Roman Imperium who gets to choose every night from eleven gorgeous spouses. The Emperor was charmed by a Christian damsel who is proving difficult to get. He soon got irritated by her virtue and returned to his old ways. The authors combined their talent, wits, and cleverness to bring this masterpiece to the public.