In addition to the poignant title story, this selection of 27 comic and cruel stories includes The Necklace and Le Horla, an account of a disintegrating personality that chillingly parallels the author's own decline into madness.
Eighteenth-century France produced only one truly international theater star, Beaumarchais, and only one name, Figaro, to combine with Don Quixote and D'Artagnan in the ranks of popular myth. But who was Figaro? He was quickly appropriated by Mozart and R
In the seventeenth century, Molière raised comedy to the pitch of great art and, three centuries later, his plays are still a source of delight. He created a new synthesis from the major comic traditions at his disposal. This collection demonstrates the
A new translation of Georges Simenon's tragic tale of lost identity--the second novel in the Inspector Maigret seriesWhat was the woman doing here? In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes! She must have been aliv
Sailors don't talk much to other men, especially not to policemen. But after Captain Fallut's body is found floating near his trawler, they all mention the Evil Eye when they speak of the Ocean's voyage. Featured the inimitable Inspector Maigret and writt
No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the la
“An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digression. Mlle. De Maupin, Lolita, Candy—all pale beside Juliette.”—Library Journal
The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit tht has yet existed, " wrote "The 120 Days of Sodom" while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual
