The publication of a representative selection of French short stories from Voltaire up to the First World War is indeed a formidable task, for the French have excelled in this literary Genre. The 27 selected stories, newly translated, are by 17 great writers such as Voltaire, Zola, France, Maupassant, Balzac and Colette.These French stories, so different from each other in voice and method, simply say, as stories do in any language "Because life was never quite like this, this is how life is." Here are stories on the short side and on the long; stories in which little happens or much. One or two are hardly more than impressions or scarps of dialogue people sit and talk in the evening about their childhoods a women is oppressed by a sense of tragedy that looms but never materializes; a little races with a wildly beating hearth through a garden. Savage justice is done in Corsica, and a romantic couple misbehave in a wood.
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