Synopses & Reviews
The Art of The NovellaToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. The Art of the Novella collection celebrates this renegade art form and it’s most illustrious practitioners with 42 of the most famous novellas ever published.
“Elegant-looking paperback editions…a good read in a small package.”
—The Wall Street Journal
The Art of the Novella collection includes one each of the following titles:
A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert
A Sleep and a Forgetting by William Dean Howells
Adolphe by Benjamin Constant
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
The Beach at Falesa by Robert Lewis Stevenson
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
The Coxon Fund by Henry James
The Dead by James Joyce
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
The Devil by Leo Tolstoy
The Dialogues of the Dogs by Miguel de Cervantes
The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
First Love by Ivan Turgenev
Freya of the Seven Isles by Joseph Conrad
The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
How the Two Ivans Quarrelled by Nikolai Gogal
Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust
The Lesson of the Master by Henry James
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain
The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling
Mathilda by Mary Shelley
May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Michael Kohlass by Heinrich Von Kleist
My Life by Anton Chekhov
The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson
Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance by Sholem Aleichem
Tales of Belkin by Alexander Pushkin
The Touchstone by Edith Warton
The Duel by Giacomo Casanova
The Duel by Joseph Conrad
The Duel by Anton Chekhov
The Duel by Heinrich Von Kleist
The Duel by Aleksandr Kuprin
“I wanted them all, even those I’d already read.”
—Ron Rosenbaum
Synopsis
Balzac's erotically charged tale of a rich and ruthless young man in nineteenth-century Paris is a daring classic. The hero, jaded in his pursuit of pleasure and novelty, falls into an amorous entanglement with a mysterious beauty. Through his growing attachment to her, he falls deeper and deeper into a dangerous web of forbidden desire. Incest, homosexuality, sexual slavery, and violence combine in the shocking conclusion of this taboo-breaking work.
Synopsis
When the night came, he went to the meeting-place, and quietly let himself be blindfolded.Raw as Honoré de Balzac is famed to be, this daring novella—never before published as a stand-alone book—is perhaps the most outlandish thing he ever wrote. While still concerned with the depiction of the underside of Parisian life, as is most of Balzac’s oeuvre, The Girl with the Golden Eyes considers not the working lives of the poor, but the sex lives of the upper crust.
In a nearly boroque rendering with erotically charged details as well as lush and extravagant language, The Girl with the Golden Eyes tells the story of a rich and ruthless young man in nineteenth century Paris caught up in an amorous entanglement with a mysterious beauty. His control slipping, incest, homosexuality, sexual slavery, and violence combine in what was then, and still remains, a shocking and taboo-breaking work.
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
About the Author
Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France, into a bourgeois family (he added the aristocratic “de” in adulthood). Soon after graduating from the Sorbonne, he quit the practice of law and, impoverished in a Parisian garret, began his legendary habit of writing feverishly around the clock, fueled by dozens of cups of coffee. He quickly produced a series of increasingly successful novels. He also began a series of failed businesses—including a publishing house and a pineapple farm—that would leave him, despite increasing fame, in hair-raising and life-long debt; his house in Paris had a hidden exit to escape creditors. Balzac cemented his status as the father of realism with his 95-volume overview of French society, the stories, essays, and novels (including
Pere Goriot,
Eugénie Grandet, and
Cousin Bette) he called
La Comédie Humaine. In 1850 the famous man-about-town married a Polish countess with whom he’d conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years, only to die three months later.
Charlotte Mandell has won the Modern Language Association Prize in translation. Among other titles she has translated for The Art of The Novella series are Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Guy De Maupassant’s The Horla.