Honore de Balzac - Novels & Short Stories (8 books)

HONORÉ de BALZAC (1799-1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of interlinked short stories and novels collectively entitled LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Balzac's unfiltered representation of society and keen observation of detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him an early pioneer of literary realism. While he admired and drew inspiration from the Romantic style of Walter Scott, Balzac sought to depict human existence through the use of particulars. In the preface to the first edition of Scènes de la Vie privée, he wrote: "The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works."

He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Proust, Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, Faulkner, Kerouac, Calvino, and philosophers such as Marx and Engels, the latter of whom wrote: "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together."


The following books are in ePUB format:

* COUSIN BETTE: Part One of Poor Relations (Penguin Classics, 2004). Translated by Marion Ayton Crawford.

* COUSIN PONS: Part Two of Poor Relations (Penguin Classics, 1968). Translated and Introduced by Herbert J. Hunt.

* THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES (Melville House, 2005). Translated by Charlotte Mandell.

* THE HUMAN COMEDY: Selected Stories (New York Review Books, 2014). Edited with an Introduction by Peter Brooks; translated by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump.

* LOST ILLUSIONS (Penguin Classics, 2004). Translated and Introduced by Herbert J. Hunt.

* OLD MAN GORIOT (Penguin Classics, 2011). Translation and Notes by Olivia McCannon; Introduction by Graham Robb.

* PÈRE GORIOT (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005). Translated by Ellen Marriage with an Introduction and Notes by Peter Connor.

* THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE / GAMBARA (New York Review Books, 2001). Translated by Richard Howard with an Introduction by Arthur C. Danto.