Les Chants de Maldoror is a remarkable work, noted for its macabre beauty and its status as one of the earliest examples of Surrealist writing. This long narrative prose poem passionately celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style, akin to religious fanaticism.

The enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse, who styled himself as Comte de Lautréamont, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846 and died in Paris at the young age of twenty-four. Upon its initial publication in 1868-9, Maldoror went largely unnoticed. However, it was later hailed as a work of genius by eminent writers such as Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. The Paris Surrealists eventually canonized Lautréamont as one of their principal "ancestors."

This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, includes a long introduction to a never-written, or now lost, volume of poetry, thus providing almost all the surviving literary work of Lautréamont.