Guy de Maupassant's scandalous tale of an opportunistic young man corrupted by the allure of power, "Bel-Ami" is translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmee in "Penguin Classics". Young, attract…
Based on Flaubert’s own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of …
First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience; together they confirm Flaubert as a master of the short story. A Simple He…
Albertine a renoncé à faire une croisière et lorsque, à la fin de l’été, elle rentre de Balbec avec le narrateur, elle s’installe chez lui, à Paris: il ne se sent plus amoureux d’elle, elle n’a plus r…
Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has …
Published in 1912, when Anatole France was sixty-eight, The Gods Will Have Blood is the story of Gamelin, an idealistic young artist appointed as a magistrate during the French Revolution. Gamelin's i…
Handsome, ambitious Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble provincial origins. Soon realizing that success can only be achieved by adopting the subtle code of hypocrisy by which society o…
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar transla…
Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935,…
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes. The …
The archetypal Victorian melodrama, as heartfelt and moving today as when it was first published, Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop is edited with notes and an introduction by Norman Page in Pe…
La Investigación sobre el conocimiento humano constituye la exposición más coherente y madura de las ideas de David Hume (1711-1776). La obra se erige en torno a la formulación de los dos grandes prin…
Jeanne, ayant fini ses malles, s'approcha de la fenêtre, mais la pluie ne cessait pas. L'averse, toute la nuit, avait sonné contre les carreaux et les toits. Le ciel bas et chargé d'eau semblait crevé,…
Like The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Botchan, a hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against "the system" in a country school, is a classic of its kind. Among Jap…
Dix-huitième volume des Rougon-Macquart, L'Argent est le premier grand western financier des temps modernes : bilans falsifiés, connivences politiques, fièvre spéculative, manipulations médiatiques, r…
