French Short Stories

This anthology gathers short fiction written in French, chiefly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in English translation. The pieces are complete tales rather than novel extracts: provincial and Parisian manners, adultery and money, war, the supernatural, and the sudden reversal typical of the form. Soldiers, clerks, peasants, and bourgeois households recur. There is no frame story and no single narrator. The volume is a sampler of the French conte and nouvelle, meant to show range of tone and setting, not to represent every period of French prose.

Bound in pale blue cloth decorated in blue, red and gold. Black slipcase with pattern and title printed on front.