Norman O. Brown.
 
New York: Random House, 1966. Maroon cloth boards in a white dust jacket with two small tears on the bottom, yellow top-stain. 276 pages. First edition. Near Fine.
 
Brown's masterpiece, a text that elevated the Dionysian tradition to high art, critical theory and meta-history as modernist poetry, a towering achievement that puts the rest of American academia to shame, and by far the most dangerous book we sell. Love's Body was intended to "torpedo" the positions Brown staked in Life Against Death. This won Brown more enemies than friends. Herbert Marcuse denounced the work as a romantic mystification of class struggle. Brown's response was legendary. After you finish the book, we strongly encourage you to read that exchange, but before you put your mind to these pages, beware: this is a paper machine built to enact the very metamorphosis it describes. It's more acid trip than book: if you read it intensely, Love's Body will take hold and change you. 
 
"At least in the life of the mind, ventures should be carried through to the end . . . But as is said over and over again at the end of Euripides' plays, the demonic is polymorphous; the gods decree many surprises; expectations were not realized; God found an opening for the unexpected; that was the way this business turned out."