World prose

Novely a povídky

Mavis Gallant

The Latehomecomer. In this selection of 13 stories which were published in The New Yorker, Gallant shows herself to be one of the century’s most accomplished, and least conventional, writers of short fiction.

Gallant was never afraid to push the boundaries of the form: many of her longer stories stray into novella field, and even her shortest pieces often defy the expectations created in the first few pages. Gallant’s characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, twentieth-century seekers often marked by World War II and its aftermath.

Maryse Condé

I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age.

Honoré de Balzac

Farewell and Other Stories. Balzac is often remembered as the author who, despite his romantic beginnings, embraced realism and critically portrayed the life and morals of French society in the first half of the 19th century. The collection includes eight of his finest novellas and short stories on a wide range of topics and fully demonstrates the mastery of suspense and revelation that were the hallmarks of Balzac’s genius.

Povídky o umělcích

Honoré de Balzac

The Unknown Masterpiece and Other Stories. Besides the large novels that make up the so-called Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac is the creator of a vast number of small-scale works, unknown masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered. The collection presents readers with five acclaimed stories about art and artists in which Balzac endowed a theme particularly close to his heart with a fusion of romance and realism.

Yuri Buida

Blue Blood. The book tells the story of Ida Zmoiro, whom Buida based on Soviet actress Valentina Karavaeva. “Actress” sounds glamorous, but Ida’s life is filled with pain: a brief marriage to an Englishman, an accident that ruins her film career by making her face look like a broken plate, the Stalinist repression, and the sudden appearance of a former husband’s wife and child. As Ida likes to say, “happiness makes you fat”. In this dark, Soviet-era transformation of a fairy tale, Buida creates his own myth of a bright soul in a world inhabited by drunkards, madmen and crooks. 

Muriel Spark

The Girls of Slender Means.The novel that takes place “long ago in 1945, when all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”

In the May of Teck Club – a London hostel ‘three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit’ – the young lady residents do their best to act as if the war never happened. They practice elocution, and jostle one another over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. But behind the girls’ giddy literary and amorous peregrinations they hide some tragically painful secrets and wounds.

Honoré de Balzac

The Lily of the Valley. The book presents a long confession of a passionate love of a young man, Félix de Vandenesse, for a mature woman, Madame de Mortsauf. Unlike many others novels from La Comédie humaine that serve as a critique of social, political and moral conditions of his time, The Lily of the Valley depicts a timeless private theme of first love and its agony.