Spirite is the tale of a woman who dies before the man she loves even notices she exists.

Spirite is one of Gautier's major prose works, yet one of his most neglected. It is the tale of a woman who dies before the man she loves even notices she exists. There follows a sometimes thrilling, sometimes touching story of interaction between the spirit world and reality. It is a mystical masterpiece. " Posterity will judge him to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but in Europe." Charles Baudelaire

The initial part of the story focuses on the romantic life of a middle aged man named Swann. Proust has used poetic style of words to describe the nature and environment of France. His sentence structure is impressive and filled with searing insightful and humorous criticisms of French society.

The less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins most rapidly.So begins an extraordinary day in the life of Mrs C - recently bereaved and searching for excitement and meaning. Drawn to the bright lights of a casino, and the passion of a desperate stranger, she discovers a purpose once again but at what cost?In this vivid and moving tale of a compassionate woman, and her defining experience, Zweig explores th...

Bruges-la-Morte, which first appeared in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the 'dead city', becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a ...

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words "dangerous"—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and ...

A devastating novel about the treachery of love by Maupassant, now in a new translation by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet and translator Richard HowardOlivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name as a young man with his Cleopatra, he has gone on to establish himself as “the chosen painter of Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls.” And though h...

Alien Hearts was the last book that Guy de Maupassant finished before his death at the early age of forty-three. It is the most original and psychologically penetrating of his several novels, and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. André Mariolle is a rich, handsome, gifted young man who cannot settle on what to do with himself. Madame de Burne, a glacially dazzling beauty, wants Mariolle to attend her exclusive salon for artists, comp...

'Beautiful and deep ... **a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent'F**ood for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times*A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year*The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for redisco...

In his three short stories, 'For a Night of Love', 'Nantas', and 'Fasting', Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfilment - romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, For a Night of Love is an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favours to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbour's interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; churchgoing women ...

The Dedalus Book of Decadence looks south to sample the essence of fine French decadent writing. It succeeds in delivering a range of writers either searching vigorously for the thrill of a healthy crime or lamenting their impuissance from a sickly stupor. Andrew St George in The Independent "An invaluable sampler of spleen, everything from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Dowson and Flecker. Let's hear it for 'luxe, calme et volupte'." Anne Billson in Time Out

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the girl of his dreams - is one of the best-known classics of German literature. Deeply imbued with the style and sentiment of German Romanticism, and philosophical and poetic in its approach to nature and existence, "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing" is at once an exhilarating romp and an exemplary distillation of nineteenth-c...