EAN 9781590176641

An NYRB Classics Original We think of Honore de Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called "The Human Comedy. " Yet along with the full-length fiction within "The""Human Comedy" stand many shorter works, among the most brilliant and forceful of his fictions. Drawn always to the tradition of oral storytelling--to the human voice telling of experience--and to the kinds of reactions produced in the listeners to stories, Balzac repeatedly dramatizes both telling and listening, and the interactions of men and women around the story told.