Guy de Maupassant: Original Short Stories (Annotated)

178 Stories, Including The Necklace — The Historic American Translation, Corrected and Restored, with a Critical Afterword and a Biography

De: Guy de Maupassant

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

One hundred and seventy-eight stories, from the war-time nightmare that made his name to the last things he wrote before the illness took him — Boule de Suif, The Necklace, Mademoiselle Fifi, Miss Harriet, and stories most readers have never had the chance to find, all in the translation that introduced Maupassant to English readers at the start of the twentieth century.

This is not a new translation. It is the historic anonymous American version, first published in 1903 and long in the public domain worldwide, corrected against a genuine problem: the source it was set from had drifted badly from itself over a century of reprinting. Two stories by other writers, wrongly credited to Maupassant for decades, have been identified and removed, with the evidence given in full. Dashes silently dropped by earlier transcription, quotation marks pointing the wrong way, French accents stripped from names and phrases, and a dozen other small corruptions have been corrected one occurrence at a time rather than by blanket rule. Nothing has been added, and every silent cut inherited from the translation itself is disclosed rather than passed over.

A critical afterword by Henry Bugalho, "The Man Who Watched," argues that the position Maupassant assigns himself across the stories — clerk, soldier, witness, the man in the room who sees but does not act — is not a biographical accident but the engine of the whole body of work.

A full life of the author, from Normandy and Flaubert's tutelage through the war, the desk job, the decade of fame, and the breakdown that ended it, completes the volume.

Please note: this volume does not include the novella Le Horla or the novel Bel-Ami, which are separate works and not part of this collection.

Contents:

• 178 stories by Guy de Maupassant, in the historic American translation, corrected and restored
• Critical afterword: "The Man Who Watched"
• Life of the author
• Note on the Texts, with full disclosure of every editorial decision

For readers who want Maupassant whole, in the English that first carried him around the world, with every correction shown rather than hidden.