"A key work in Colettes oeuvre, THE PURE AND THE IMPURE takes the form of a series of dialogue-based vignettes about men and women, through which the interlocutor "Colette" explores varieties of sexual expression, gender identity, love, and "purity." As an impartial journalist of the sensual "Colette" engages with these men and women, and reports back on the exigencies of human desire and its diverse manifestations. By turns elusively abstract and gorgeously limpid, THE PURE AND THE IMPURE is a remarkably prescient and deeply personal excavation of sexuality and identity. Elliptical, allusive, sometimes obscure, yet precise-The Pure and the Impure has elicited equal parts consternation and praise since its publication in 1932. In a series of dialogue-based vignettes, a journalist and fiction writer named Colette guides us through the sexual underworld of Belle Époque Paris, interviewing representatives of its various subcultures-the libertines, the cross-dressing lesbians of "Lesbos-sur-Seine," the clique of gay men who toiled as "Monsieur Willys" ghostwriters alongside Colette-with at least one foray far afield, to the secluded Welsh cottage that in the Age of Revolution cloistered a famed same-sex couple, the Ladies of Llangollen. In this remarkably prescient book, through strikingly vivid and evocative portraits, many of them of her friends and lovers, Colette explores varieties of sexual expression, gender identity, love, and sensual pleasure. In these pages we meet, among others, "Charlotte," an older woman who feigns orgasm to please her tubercular young lover; the playwright Henry Bernstein (Colettes "friend X"), a "celebrated" Don Juan; the sapphic poet Renée Vivien; and Missy, the Marquise de Belbeuf ("La Chevalière"), Colettes genderqueer onetime lover. In this first new English translation in nearly 60 years, Careaus lean, elegant, and highly readable rendition reproduces Colettes extraordinary musicality, making her "perfect, lapidary and truth-bearing sentences" (Terry Castle) sing for English readers"-- Provided by publisher.