Balzac S Shorter Stories

One thing is essential about the characters of Balzac: they are multi-faceted. Even the simplest ones are morally ambiguous, complex, completely human. In his profound observation of the human soul, Balzac mirrors human character in inanimate objects and the city of Paris itself becomes a character full of life.Through the seven short stories selected here you can know a little more about this author and a little more about yourself:The Red InnEl VerdugoThe Atheist's MassLa Grande BretècheThe Elixir of LifeStudy of a WomanDomestic Peace

This is a new release of the original 1932 edition.

DIV6 short-story masterpieces by great French novelist include "An Episode During the Terror," "A Passion in the Desert," "The Revolutionary Conscript," 3 more. Excellent new English translations on facing pages. /div

Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine. Balzac's Shorter Fictions explores this corpus, the nature of short fiction, and how Balzac's novels developed from his stories. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.

An NYRB Classics Original Characters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more—move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s multivolume magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. The Human Comedy includes the great roomy novels that have exercised such a sway over Balzac’s many literary inheritors, from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to Marcel Proust; it also contains an array of short fictions in which Balzac is at his most concentrated and forceful. Nine of these, all newly translated, appear in this volume, and together they provide an unequaled overview of a great writer’s obsessions and art. Here are “The Duchesse de Langeais,” “A Passion in the Desert,” and “Sarrasine”; tales of madness, illicit passion, ill-gotten gains, and crime. What unifies them, Peter Brooks points out in his introduction, is an incomparable storyteller’s fascination with the power of storytelling, while throughout we also detect what Proust so admired: the “mysterious circulation of blood and desire.”

One of the greatest French novelists, Balzac was also an accomplished writer of shorter fiction. This volume includes twelve of his finest short stories - many of which feature characters from his epic series of novels the Comédie Humaine. Compelling tales of acute social and psychological insight, they fully demonstrate the mastery of suspense and revelation that were the hallmarks of Balzac's genius. In The Atheist's Mass, we learn the true reason for a distinguished atheist surgeon's attendance at religious services; La Grande Breteche describes the horrific truth behind the locked doors of a decaying country mansion, while The Red Inn relates a brutal tale of murder and betrayal. A fascinating counterpoint to the renowned novels, all the stories collected here stand by themselves as mesmerizing works by one of the finest writers of nineteenth-century France.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1887 Edition.

30 Short Stories about Medieval France In the Droll Stories, Honore de Balzac takes the reader back in time, in Medieval France when knights and kings ruled the land. Yes, they were brave and wise but also droll, naïve and lustful. Follow their adventure and see them with Balzac’s eyes: comical and human after all. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it.