Selected Short Stories

The man who created the Comédie Humaine — the ninety-novel sequence that aimed to document every aspect of French society — was also one of the great masters of the short story. This Penguin Classics selection gathers the finest of Balzac’s shorter fiction, and shows in concentrated form the qualities that make him one of the supreme realists in world literature.

These are stories of Paris and the French provinces: of artists and merchants, of inherited wealth and clawing ambition, of love destroyed by money and money destroyed by love. Balzac watches his characters with a social scientist’s eye and a novelist’s heart — he understands exactly how the world works, and he pities the people caught in it without quite being able to save them. His psychological insight is remarkable; his appetite for the specifics of money, class, and social performance is insatiable.

The collection includes ‘Sarrasine’ — the story that became the foundation of Roland Barthes’s landmark analysis S/Z — alongside other essential Balzac. Translated by Sylvia Raphael. The ideal entry point into one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century. Published by Penguin Classics.