I'm getting Nerval and Other selected Writings - Penguin Black Classic edn. My research shows it's the best one you can get and quite affordable. It handily includes Sylvie, which is considered his masterpiece not only by Proust. Here's a blurb: Charles Baudelaire regarded Nerval as the most lucid poet of the age, and Marcel Proust ranked him as one of its greatest prose writers. Andre Breton claimed Nerval as the precursor of Surrealism, and Antonin Artaud placed him in the same visionary company as Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh. This selection of writings provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belletrist, short-story writer, and autobiographer. In addition to "Aurelia," the memoir of his madness, "Sylvie" (considered a "masterpiece" by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of "The Chimeras," this volume includes Nerval's doppelgnger tales and experimental fictions. Selections from his correspondence demonstrate a lucid awareness of the strategies by which nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his visionary imagination to the purgatory of mental illness. This volume will confirm Nerval's major place in literary history as much more than the amiable eccentric who walked live lobsters on blue ribbons through the streets of Paris
I can also commend to your interest Chant De Maldoror and Poems by the infamous Comte de Lautreamont in penguin black classic although publisher Exact Change has put out his complete works. If you want to read weird fiction you can't go past this disturbing set of writings. I'm sure you have Huysmans The Damned but if you don't have Against Nature Penguin Classics have put out a nice edn. of this as well.
Blurb for Maldoror and Poems: Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andre Gide and Andre Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece
*NB Both Nerval and Lautreamont were recommended to me by Melbourne author K.J. Bishop late last year who wrote the excellent debut novel The Etched City which I think you have read correct? She is a big fan of Lautreamont.
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