Author(s): Guy De Maupassant

Fiction

Widely considered to be the greatest short story writer in all of French literature, Guy de Maupassant helped define the modern short story, deeply influencing the likes of Chekhov, Maugham, Babel, and O. Henry. Yet despite his mastery of the form, existing English translations continue to render his prose in an archaic, nineteenth-century style. Convinced that this Parisian civil servant and protege of Flaubert deserved to be modernized in the same way that Lydia Davis had brought Madame Bovary to coruscating life, Sandra Smith selected twenty-eight classic Maupassant short stories, including "The Necklace," his devastating depiction of aspiration and ruin, as well as two novellas, "Le Horla" and "Boule de Suif," widely considered his masterpiece. All written between 1880 and 1890-three years before Maupassant's death at the age of forty-three-and divided thematically into tales of French life, war, and the supernatural, The Necklace and Other Stories promises to reintroduce Maupassant to twenty-first-century readers.