Guy de Maupassant - Böcker

Novellsamlingen Fettpärlan av Guy de Maupassant i nyöversättning av Marie Berthelius som också skrivit det initierade efterordet. Berättelsen om Fettpärlan har kallats en av världens bästa noveller, blivit filmatiserad otaliga gånger i vitt skilda tappningar och efter metoo är den aktuellare än någonsin. Huvudpersonen Fettpärlan är prostituerad och har hamnat i samma vagn som de respektabla som rynkar på näsan åt henne. Färden går genom ett ihållande snöoväder med det tysk-franska kriget 1870 som omgivande ram och oroande bakgrund. De respektabla i kupén uttrycker med blickar och små diskreta men ändå bitska kommentarer att de egentligen borde ha förvägrat Fettpärlan att åka med i denna fina vagn. Föga anar de vad som strax ska ske. Något som kan fördärva deras liv fullkomligt – om inte Fettpärlan kan tänka sig att rädda hela sällskapet. Det är ju inte så mycket begärt. Hon behöver ju bara bjuda ut sig ännu en gång... Novellen publicerades 1880 och innebar Maupassants stora genombrott. Över en natt blev han hela det litterära Frankrikes gunstling. Han var då trettio år. När han dog av syfilis tretton år senare hade han författat närmare trehundra noveller, sex romaner och hundratalet essäer och tidningsartiklar. Han räknas som Frankrikes genom tiderna främste novellförfattare. Maupassants läromästare var Gustave Flaubert, som var barndomsvän med hans mor. Det var Flaubert som uppmuntrade den spirande författaren att satsa på prosan i stället för poesin och blev ett slags ställföreträdande far och mentor. Han uppmanade adepten att träna observationsförmågan, grundligt studera karakteristiska drag och ingående beskriva människor, djur och företeelser. Därefter skärskådades och kritiserades dessa skrivövningar med vändande post eller under långa textsamtal om söndagarna. Till vår volym har vi valt sju av Maupassants allra bästa noveller, här i nyöversättning av Marie Berthelius som också skrivit det initierade efterordet. Följande noveller ingår: Fettpärlan Ett Parisäventyr Mademoiselle Fifi Hårnålen Ånger Historien om en bondpiga Olivlunden.

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as 'At Sea' and 'Boule de Suif', vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant's stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

A selection of Maupassant's brilliant, glittering stories set in the Parisian beau monde and Normandy countryside.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Maupassant's works available in Penguin Classics are A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean.

'It was raining as it only rains in Normandy, as though great gouts of water were being sprayed by some angry, giant hand.'Maupassant believed that we delude ourselves into believing that we are not animals acting upon instinct but rational creatures capable of idealistic beliefs and actions and survive only on the drug of self-deception. Maupassant's disgust with creation was only equalled by his contempt for human hypocrisy, and in these tales he takes a scalpel to our illusions and cuts to the bone. But his clinical pessimism is redeemed by a sense of the absurd and a warmer compassion for 'humanity bleeding'. Unsentimental but always honest, he persuades us that life is an incomprehensible, cosmic farce. This translation of twenty tales shows Maupassant at his bitter, bawdy, chilling best. It features some of his grimmest and most famous stories such as A Vendetta and The Grove of Olives, and it also reflects both his moods and his mastery of the short story. The Little Keg is rich in comic invention, while the disturbing Who Can Tell? draws its power from the strange forces which drove its author into madness.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul SartreMaupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885) is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-siècle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism.Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic. But the creative tension between its analysis of modern behaviour and its identifiably late nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time, as well as being recognized as Maupassant's greatest achievement as a novelist. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth' What is a life? How shall a storyteller conceive a life? What if art means pattern and life has none? How, then, can any story be true to life? These are some of the questions which inform the first of Maupassant's six novels, A Life (Une Vie) (1883) in which he sought to parody and expose the folly of romantic illusion. An unflinching presentation of a woman's life of failure and disappointments, where fulfilment and happiness might have been expected, A Life recounts Jeanne de Lamare's gradual lapse into a state of disillusion. With its intricate network of parallels and oppositions, A Life reflects the influence of Flaubert in its attention to form and its coherent structure. It also expresses Maupassant's characteristic naturalistic vision in which the satire of bourgeois manners, the representation of the aristocracy in pathological decline, the undermining of human individuality and ideals, and the study of deterioration and disintegration, all play a role. But above all Maupassant brings to his first novel the short story writer's genius for a focused tension between stasis and change, and A Life is one of his most compelling portraits of dispossession and powerlessness. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This selection of twenty-seven stories shows Maupassant at his comic, cruel, and brilliant best. In addition to the poignant title story, it includes one of the most famous tales ever written, The Necklace , and Le Horla, an account of a disintegrating personality that chillingly parallels the author's own decline into madness. All the stories demonstrate his genius for invention and his ability to write unblinkingly about the absurdity of the human condition, supporting Henry James' claim that in the annals of story-telling, Maupassant stands `like a lion in the path'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.Often described as the father of the modern short story, there is perhaps no other writer more closely associated with the form than Guy de Maupassant. Included here is his most famous story, 'Boule de Suif', as well as tales of love, such as the brilliant 'Happiness', and the supernatural, like the chilling 'The Horla'.

Accompanying the text are essays, letters and newspaper articles on the subjects that influenced Maupassant’s writing, and critical assessments from his time to our own, along with a chronology and bibliography.

In his stories Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) blended brilliantly realistic depictions of characters moving against carefully described backgrounds with an objectivity and universality that has earned him a place among the finest of all short-story writers. In this collection of seven of his most popular stories, each tale reflects both the author's intimate familiarity with Paris and the provinces in the Belle Époque, as well as a non-judgmental humanism that is one of Maupassant's most attractive qualities.Included in this volume are his celebrated masterpiece "Boule de Suif," along with six other finely crafted selections: "La Parure," "Mademoiselle Fifi," "La Maison Tellier," "La Ficelle," "Miss Harriet," and "Le Horla.The stories are printed in French with excellent new word-for-word English translations on the facing pages.Students of both French and English will find here an excellent resource for upgrading their language skills. Admirers of fine literature will enjoy the conciseness, strength, and rigorous economy that characterize Maupassant's art.

He looked up at the picture rail, and there was the hand holding on to a hook with three fingers, and slowly scratching the head of the parrot with the fourth.In 1919, W. F. Harvey published 'The Beast with Five Fingers', his quintessential tale of the disembodied hand with a murderous mind of its own, and its position as one of weird fiction's true classics was cemented by the 1946 film adaptation. Seeking to trace the origins of the haunted hand story back into the nineteenth century, and to showcase its influence on writers of weird fiction from the 1920s to the modern day, horror expert Brian J. Showers presents a new collection of classics from the well-thumbed oeuvres of Sheridan Le Fanu and Guy de Maupassant through to miniature masterpieces from the hands of Jean Ray, Mark Valentine and many more.Featuring ghostly hands, hands possessed by demons and unexplained hands where no hands should be, prepare to enter a world of nightmares run amok as the vice-grip of terror takes hold.

Spurned lovers return from the grave to haunt theirpartners, ghost ships materialise on the sea, men's hands take on a life oftheir own... Welcome to the unsettling world of the French weird. Though the development of the weird tale in Franceoriginally drew on Gothic traditions in Germany, it soon became more heavilyinfluenced by the emerging romantic movement. French weird tales often includeelements of fable and romance, but they're just as likely to go to the otherextreme in chilling contes cruels. The stories in this anthology follow theevolution of the weird from the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution right throughto the end of the twentieth century. They're stories influenced by, and to someextent seeking to justify, civil and political unrest and how people coped withconstant change and rebellion, seeking some solace amongst the chaos.