Balzac: 1669 books

'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an impetuous young sculptor falls in...

This novella is part of the Scenes From Private Life section of Honore de Balzac's sprawling story cycle The Human Comedy. Trapped in a maddeningly frustrating love triangle and unable to express his true feelings to his beloved, protagonist Paz invents an imaginary mistress to use as an excuse for his lovesickness and increasing alienation from his group of friends.

The Magic Skin by the French novelist and playwright, Honore de Balzac.This book also known as The Wild Ass's Skin.This bokk will tell you about the story of young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fullfills his every desire.

Famous perfectionist Honore de Balzac labored for years to bring the fascinating idea behind The Magic Skin to life in a novel, and critics and fans alike agree that it is one of the French writer's masterworks. The story follows the experiences of a young man who finds a small piece of animal skin that...

Balzac's La Comedie Humaine was a story cycle comprising more than 100 novels and stories. Although most of these works are set in nineteenth-century France, several hearken back to earlier periods. Catherine de' Medici centers on the life of the woman born into an aristocratic family in medieval Italy who went on to become Queen consort and, later, regent of France.

An engrossing tale by Balzac it is remarkable for its masterful blend of realism and romance. Mesmerizing!

This is a painfully drawn portrayal of private life, but its wider subject-matter also makes it a fictional document of post-revolutionary France. Many people (among them Henry James) have considered Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare, classical story of...

Sometimes you want to read in French. Sometimes you want to read in English. There’s a great option: bilingual books! Bilingual, or dual-language books, are books in which text appears side-by-side in both the target language and English. These are some of the French books to enjoy since you can...

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace—a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings,...

Like many of the short stories in Honore de Balzac's vast story cycle The Human Comedy, "The Red Inn" is a tale within a tale. After a pleasant dinner at the Red Inn, guests begin to swap anecdotes. German businessman Hermann contributes to the discussion with a story about a French soldier who was imprisoned after being unjustly accused of committing a murder.

This and the successor volumes in this series provides a historical view of how and what several important novelists were writing about these subjects in the past by making a number of these novels available inexpensively in a single place.  A modern reader may consider them rather tame if they...

The Lily Of The Valley by Honore de Balzac.

Some of Honore de Balzac's best writing focuses on the frustrations and passions of women trapped in unhappy marriages. In the novella "The Deserted Woman," the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is trapped, but it is partially a trap of her own making. Abandoned by her lover and estranged from her husband, she contemplates her limited options.

Set against the backdrop of the Peninsular War, Balzac's novella "Juana" focuses on a storied family of French courtesans who have achieved legendary status. For many generations, the women have lived outside of the bounds of polite society, eschewing the familial involvement of men and maintaining a matrilineal tradition. But with the birth of a little girl named Juana, everything changes.