Short Stories

This collection gathers the short fiction Maupassant wrote in the 1880s and early 1890s. Typical pieces are tightly plotted anecdotes of Norman farms, Paris offices, seaside hotels, and the Franco-Prussian War: a piece of string, a necklace, a coach journey, a clerk's Sunday, a hunter's night. Recurring subjects are money, sexual bargain, social humiliation, and the sudden reversal that exposes a life. Narrators are often cool observers who decline to moralize at length. The book is a body of independent tales, not a novel cycle and not a memoir of the Norman countryside.

Bound in lilac cloth with an illustrative design in purple by Lambourne. Dark green, grey or black slipcase.