During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including 'Boule de Suif', 'The Necklace', 'The House of Madame Tellier', 'The Hand', 'The Horla' and 'Mademoiselle Fifi'. Marked by the psychological realism that he famously pioneered, the tales in this selection lead us on a tour of the human experience-lust and love, revenge and ridicule, terror and madness. Many take place in the author's native Normandy, but the settings range farther abroad as well, from Brittany and Paris to Corsica and the Mediterranean coast, and even to North Africa and India. Maupassant's remarkable range and ability to evoke an entire world in a few pages have ensured that his fiction has retained its power to entertain through generations of readers. Marjorie Laurie's accomplished translations from the 1920s have similarly stood the test of time.

Evariste-D sir de Parny, though largely forgotten now, was well known in the nineteenth century for his lyric poems, especially the Po sies Erotiques (1778-81), and the prose-poems in Chansons Mad casses (1787). He also wrote much humorous verse, including the anti-religious La Guerre des Dieux (1799) and Le Paradis perdu (1805). The latter is a parody of Milton's Paradise Lost in four relatively short cantos. It gives a central place to the War in Heaven, casting Satan as a revolutionary. It is highly entertaining in itself, and also an important example of parody as critical response to an original text.