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Product Description
Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title—offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.
This edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by Nancy Springer.
When Dorian Gray, a wealthy but naïve and irresistible young man, has his portrait pointed, he rashly wishes that he could remain as beautiful, youthful, and alluring as the handsome face in the portrait. Little does he know that his wish will come true. When encouraged by the decadent Lord Henry Wotton into a life of depravity and self-indulgence, Gray is stunned to discover that while the face in the painting is aging grotesquely, he is not! In fact, he remains as beautiful as ever. Nothing ages him.
But Gray's wanton lifestyle will eventually catch up with him, and the consequences of his reckless behavior will come to haunt him.
Amazon.com Review
"Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin." In their ideal of an exquisitely sensitive temperament that thrills to fine shadings in sensation, the principles of the aesthetic (or "decadent") movement are well suited to the tale of terror. No story exemplifies this better than Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The sparkling wit and zest for life of Wilde's characters combine with cold-blooded acts of horror to generate a deliciously twisted sense of elegance and evil, civilization and degradation. Oscar Wilde, like Edgar Allan Poe, shows us that what we find loathsome and frightening can also be beautiful.
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