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Extracts

Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant

Femme Fatale

A selection of Maupassant's brilliant, glittering stories set in the Parisian beau monde and Normandy countryside. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Maupassant's works available in Penguin Classics are A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean.

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Maupassant's works available in Penguin Classics are A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean.

A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

A new selection and translation of the best of de Maupassant's short stories

Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) was a literary disciple of Flaubert and one of the group of young Naturalistic writers that formed around Zola. Maupassant's contribution to the Naturalists collaborative collection of tales, Les Soirées de Medan, was 'Boule de suif', which remains one of the most well-known of the hundreds of stories he wrote over the course of his life and on which his literary reputation now rests. He also wrote six novels, including Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre et Jean (1888). 
 
 
Sian Miles was born in Wales and educated there and in France where she lived for many years. She now teaches at Warwick University and is the author of an anthology of the writings of Simone Weil, and translations of George Sand's Marianne, Violet Trefusis's Echo, and has collaborated on Paul Valéry's Cahiers/ Notebooks.

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as 'At Sea' and 'Boule de Suif', vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant's stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

Guy de Maupassant

Siân Miles

Often described as the father of the modern short story, there is perhaps no other writer more closely associated with the form than Guy de Maupassant. Included here is his most famous story, 'Boule de Suif', as well as tales of love, such as the brilliant 'Happiness', and the supernatural, like the chilling 'The Horla'.

Guy de Maupassant

Books by Guy de Maupassant

Articles featuring Guy de Maupassant

Femme Fatale by Guy de Maupassant

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