Bayou Folk And A Night In Acadie

In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. These two collections - 'Bayou Folk' was first published in 1895 and 'A Night in Acadie' in 1897 - established Chopin's reputation as a regional realist. With a gentle, knowing gaze, Chopin evokes the distant world of Louisiana plantations and 'Cadian balls, and anticipated the thoroughly modern multi-ethnic, gender-sensitive, and sexually charged world of more modern times. Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk

A pretty book of tales drawn from life among the Creoles and Acadians of Louisiana. They represent with fidelity and spirit characters and customs unfamiliar to most readers ; they are admirably told, with just enough dialect for local color; and they can hardly fail to be very popular. Some of these stories are little more than croquis — just a brief incident of idea sketched in with a few rapid strokes and left to the imagination of the reader to be materialized, if we may so speak. Others are longer and more finished, but all are full of that subtle, alien quality which holds the Creole apart from the Anglo-Saxon — a quality we do not quite understand and can never reproduce, but which is full of fascination to us from the very fact that it is so unlike ourselves.

Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie are short story collections by Louisiana Creole author Kate Chopin. Many of the stories are set in Natchitoches in north-central Louisiana. The characters in stories are usually residents of Louisiana, and many are Creoles of various ethnic or racial backgrounds. Table of Contents: Bayou Folk: A No-Account Creole In and Out of Old Natchitoches In Sabine A Very Fine Fiddle Beyond the Bayou Old Aunt Peggy The Return of Alcibiade A Rude Awakening The Bênitous' Slave Désirée's Baby A Turkey Hunt Madame Célestin's Divorce Love on the Bon-Dieu Loka Boulôt and Boulotte For Marse Chouchoute A Visit to Avoyelles A Wizard from Gettysburg Ma'ame Pélagie At the 'Cadian Ball La Belle Zoraïde A Gentleman of Bayou Têche A Lady of Bayou St. John A Night in Acadie: A Night in Acadie Athénaïse After the Winter Polydore Regret A Matter of Prejudice Caline A Dresden Lady in Dixie Nég Créol The Lilies Azélie Mamouche A Sentimental Soul Dead Men's Shoes At Chênière Caminada Odalie Misses Mass Cavanelle Tante Cat'rinette A Respectable Woman Ripe Figs Ozème's Holiday

Kate Chopin did not begin writing until the late 1880s, driven by financial necessity and a desire for intellectual activity. Her first novel, At Fault, was printed privately in 1890. Her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), were published by Houghton Mifflin and Way & Williams, respectively. Chopin's early work was shaped by William Dean Howells's realism, though her later ironic pieces show the influence of Guy de Maupassant. Despite living in Louisiana for a brief fourteen years, Chopin infuses her texts with Creole, Cajun, and African American cultures. Her portrait of this uniquely Louisianan society, combined with her employment of dialect and regional mannerisms, contribute to her particular flourish as a local colorist. Many of the twenty-three stories included in Bayou Folk (1894) are set in the Cane River country of Louisiana where Chopin herself lived for several years. In these stories her characters challenge the limits of their socioeconomic station and rebel against the social mores of their times. While this collection earned Chopin praise, her acclaim diminished within her lifetime as she more frequently turned to subject matter that critics considered scandalous. All but four of the stories collected in this volume had been published previously.

In the decade prior to the publication of her landmark novel, The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin wrote about ninety short stories. She gathered twenty-three of them in a collection entitled Bayou Folk in 1894, and followed that three years later with a collection of twenty-one more in A Night in Acadie. Together, these nuanced portraits of nineteenth-century inhabitants of New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish exquisitely form a sort of Southern novel of manners.

Telèsphore had been unconsciously watching her the whole time and perceiving her straight he arose and went to her assistance. But the window could not be opened. When he had grown red in the face and wasted an amount of energy that would have driven the plow for a day, he offered her his seat on the shady side. She demurred—there would be no room for the bundle. He suggested that the bundle be left where it was and agreed to assist her in keeping an eye upon it. She accepted Telèsphore’s place at the shady window and he seated himself beside her...FROM THE BOOKS.

Collects all of the author's fiction for the first time, including stories meant for "A Vocation and a Voice," a book canceled by her publisher in 1900.