About the book: 2006 / The title of this collection of selected works by the English writer Arthur Machen was the original, working title of the novel "The Hill of Dreams", written in 1897 and published in 1907, as well as the order name Avallaunius, given to the writer in 1889 upon initiation into the Temple of Isis-Urania of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Along with the novel, according to reviewers, “the most decadent work of English literature,” the book includes novellas and short stories from different years, without which no anthology of English prose of the 19th - 20th centuries can exist. cannot be considered complete. “The invisible is here and calls to you” - this saying on the altar of a dilapidated village church, which so greatly captured the imagination of young Machen, could probably become an epigraph to his entire work, in which Christianity is closely intertwined with the Celtic tradition. An excellent expert in ancient mythology and medieval mysticism, who devoted his entire life to the study of occult sciences, magic and druidical practices, A. Machen based his work on the deepest symbolism of traditional Knowledge, which a detailed introductory article and notes will help the reader understand. However, his outstanding literary talent allowed the writer to so naturally and organically “implant” hidden and obvious allusions to the Hermetic sciences into his works that these, although dark, but always intuitively understandable hints in no way interfere with the perception of the artistic merits of his stylistically impeccable prose. “There is something sinful in the beauty of this book,” Lord A. Douglas wrote in his review of the novel “Hill of Dreams.” “It is like a strange orchid, the color of which is painfully painful and repulsive at the same time, and the aroma is unbearably sweet and almost deprives consciousness. The cruelty of this book is much more savage than the most cruel of the descriptions presented in it... It is like a terrible liturgy in honor of pain, poisoning itself, pain set to music, each note of which is strictly calibrated: the melody becomes truly unbearable, because Each phrase is honed to perfection, and the modulations are unsurpassed".