{"product_id":"the-human-comedy-isbn-9781590176641","title":"The Human Comedy","description":"An NYRB Classics Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharacters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks,  unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots,  and more—move through the pages of \u003ci\u003eThe Human Comedy\u003c\/i\u003e, Balzac’s multivolume magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. \u003ci\u003eThe Human Comedy\u003c\/i\u003e includes the great roomy novels that have exercised such a sway over Balzac’s many literary inheritors, from Dostoyevsky and Henry James to Marcel Proust; it also contains an array of short fictions in which Balzac is at his most concentrated and forceful. Nine of these, all newly translated, appear in this volume, and together they provide an unequaled overview of a great writer’s obsessions and art. Here are “The Duchesse de Langeais,” “A Passion in the Desert,” and “Sarrasine”; tales of madness, illicit passion, ill-gotten gains, and crime. What unifies them, Peter Brooks points out in his introduction, is an incomparable storyteller’s fascination with the power of storytelling, while throughout we also detect what Proust so admired: the “mysterious circulation of blood and desire.”“The great thing about work this entertaining is that it’s still exciting nearly 200 years on.\" —Nicholas Lezard, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“These  tales provide the reader a healthy introduction to Balzac’s famous  hyperbole, his melodrama, and his extended descriptions and explanations  where nothing goes unsaid. We don’t read Balzac for his refined style;  rather, his genius lies in the sheer ambition of his reach, the vastness  of his grasp.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The characters and sentences still leap from the page as if they were trapped there just seconds ago. It’s just choosing where to begin….Happily, in \u003ci\u003eThe Human Comedy: Selected Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, Peter Brooks has managed to capture this enormous range and more by plucking a mere nine of the Frenchmen’s best tales. There is a good range on display here, as broad as the Napoleonic Empire. Dandies and duchesses discuss the decline of aristocratic mores at a dinner party in “Another Study of Womankind.” In “A Passion in the Desert,” a soldier lost in the Sahara stumbles upon an oasis, which he discovers is inhabited by a panther. Out of such tales one can see how Balzac was the great-grandfather to writers as diverse as Colette and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.” —Friedrich Engels \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Balzac, every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will.” —Charles Baudelaire \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs together perfectly.” —Henry James\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense.” —V. S. Pritchett\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius.” —André Maurois\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eHonoré de Balzac\u003c\/b\u003e (1799–1850), one of the greatest and most  influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège  de Vendôme and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous  writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a  historical novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Chouans\u003c\/i\u003e. Balzac then conceived his great work, \u003ci\u003eLa Comédie humaine\u003c\/i\u003e,  an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete  picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an  extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in  the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as \u003ci\u003ePère Goriot\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEugénie Grandet\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLost Illusions\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eCousin Bette\u003c\/i\u003e.  In 1850, he married Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish woman with whom he  had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he  died. In addition to the present collection, NYRB Classics publishes a  translation of Balzac’s \u003ci\u003eThe Unknown Masterpiece\u003c\/i\u003e and\u003ci\u003e Gambara\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePeter Brooks \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of several books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eFlaubert in the Ruins of Paris, \u003c\/i\u003eas well as two novels, \u003ci\u003eWorld Elsewhere\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Emperors’ Body; \u003c\/i\u003eand essays and book reviews in many places. He edited Balzac’s \u003ci\u003eThe Human Comedy: Short Stories\u003c\/i\u003e for NYRB, and also Vivant Denon’s \u003ci\u003eNo Tomorrow\u003c\/i\u003e.  He is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Yale, and also taught recently at Princeton.  He divides his life between Alexandria, VA and New Haven, CT.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLinda Asher\u003c\/b\u003e has translated works by Milan Kundera, Georges Simenon, Victor Hugo,  Jean-Pierre Vernant, Restif de la Bretonne, and many others. A former  fiction editor at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, she has and ASCAP Deems Taylor translation prizes and is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCarol Cosman\u003c\/b\u003e is a translator of French literature and letters. Her work includes \u003ci\u003eExile and the Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e by Albert Camus, \u003ci\u003eColonel Chabert\u003c\/i\u003e by Honoré de Balzac, \u003ci\u003eAmerica Day by Day\u003c\/i\u003e by Simone de Beauvoir, \u003ci\u003eThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life\u003c\/i\u003e by Emile Durkheim, and \u003ci\u003eThe Family Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e (a study of Flaubert) by Jean-Paul Sartre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJordan Stump\u003c\/b\u003e is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; the author, most recently, of \u003ci\u003eThe Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e;  and the translator of some twenty works of (mostly) contemporary French  prose by authors such as Marie NDiaye, Eric Chevillard, Antoine  Volodine, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His translation of Claude Simon’s  \u003ci\u003eThe Jardin des Plantes\u003c\/i\u003e won the French-American Foundation’s annual translation prize in 2001.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299709571301,"sku":"NP9781590176641","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590176641.jpg?v=1767739860","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-human-comedy-isbn-9781590176641","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}