Selected Stories Hb Everymans Library Classics

Selected Stories of Guy de Maupassant is an Everyman’s Library Classics hardback anthology of 32 stories by the major nineteenth-century French writer. Drawn from Maupassant’s extraordinarily productive period in the 1880s, the volume includes renowned works such as “The Necklace,” “Boule de Suif,” “The Horla,” and “Mademoiselle Fifi.”

Maupassant’s concise, sharply observed stories examine love and desire, social class, greed, war, vanity, marriage, revenge, ridicule, terror, and madness. Many are set in his native Normandy, while others move through Paris, Brittany, Corsica, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and India. Their power comes from psychological realism, memorable detail, irony, and the ability to evoke an entire social world in a small number of pages.

This edition revives translations first published in Everyman’s Library in 1934, translated by Marjorie Laurie and Brian Rhys. It adds a new introduction by Catriona Seth, plus a bibliography and chronology of Maupassant’s life and times.