Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine. Balzac's Shorter Fictions explores this corpus, the nature of short fiction, and how Balzac's novels developed from his stories. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.

Jules Verne's most beloved novels are gathered here in one hardcover volume: three thrilling tales of fabulous journeys under, through, and around the earth.
Verne was one of the great pioneers of science fiction. Born in France in 1828, he wrote brilliantly about space, air, and underwater travel long before airplanes and space ships had been invented, and he is still one of the most widely read internationally of all science-fiction writers.
But beyond charting new territory for adventurous fiction, his creations have entered our culture and taken on the magnitude and vitality of myth. It is hard to imagine anyone who has not heard of Captain Nemo and his giant submarine exploring the ruins of Atlantis in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, " Phileas Fogg's frantic race around the world by every means of transportation in "Round the World in Eighty Days, " and the harrowing descent through a volcanic crater to underground caverns where prehistoric creatures roam in "Journey to the Center of the Earth." These stories have seized the imaginations of readers for generations and are as vivid and exciting now as when their author first imagined traveling beyond the bounds of the possible.
Translated by Henry Frith
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, it looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels - all genres the century radically reinvented. It then explores numerous modernities, ways nineteenth-century writing and mentalities look forward to our own, before turning to marginalities - subjects and voices the canon traditionally forgot. No genre was left unchanged by the nineteenth century. This book will help to discover them anew.