Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Death of Balzac

The Death of Balzac

Mirbeau, Octave
Stableford, Brian

Paperback

Fiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 1943813566
ISBN13: 9781943813568
Publisher: Snuggly Books
Published: Apr 16 2018
Pages: 92
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.22 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

Here, presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of Octave Mirbeau's darkest works: a fictionalized account of the death of the giant of French letters, ­Honoré de Balzac.

Among his journalistic endeavors, Mirbeau contributed a large number of short stories to the newspapers in the fin-de-siècle period, and he honed his skill in that kind of work to near-perfection. Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be true, and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction, and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ­ambiguous kind, however, are quite as brazen or as seductively ­persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up The Death of Balzac, which, seen purely as a literary exercise, is a masterpiece of sorts, in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration. It is a gripping and affectively powerful story, artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.

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