Born in Normandy, Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) is the author of over three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel Ami and Pierre et Jean. He is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the modern short story. Sandra Smith is the translator of Camus' The Stranger and Irène Nemirovsky's Suite Française, which won her the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation prize and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. She lives in New York.

"Smith successfully captures Maupassant's depiction of 19th-century French culture using terminology that allows these wonderful texts to reach a fresh generation of readers. A solid translation of some wonderful short stories." -- Erica Swenson Danowitz - Library Journal, Starred review "Sandra Smith has a sterling reputation for shaking the dust off previous translations while leaving the meaning and the feeling of a classic work of literature intact. She has succeeded again with this beloved collection of stories by Maupassant and delivered in English the vitality and excitement his first nineteenth-century French readers appreciated." -- Alice Kaplan, John M. Musser Professor of French, Yale University or author of Dreaming in French