The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

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.”

• Attack on the Mill and Other Stories
• The Unknown Masterpiece (New York Review Books Classics)
• Pere Goriot (Oxford World's Classics)
• Lost Illusions (Modern Library Classics)
• Berlin Alexanderplatz (New York Review Books Classics)
• Like Death (New York Review Books Classics)
• Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)
• A Harlot High and Low (The Human Comedy)
• The Black Sheep (The Human Comedy)
• The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics)