Droll Stories — Complete
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who have read Balzac's novels and want to see another side of him
- Readers who enjoy European classical short stories and satirical, humorous tales
- Foreign literature enthusiasts with some English reading ability
- Students of literary writing and comparative literature in need of short-story material
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer serious drama and dislike worldly banter
- Beginners who struggle with English and need a Chinese translation
- Readers hoping for a social panorama in the manner of The Human Comedy
Reading tips
- You need not read straight through; start with short pieces with intriguing titles.
- After each piece, note the relationship between the narrator's tone and the story's frame.
- Read alongside the European comic story tradition, noting the archaic style and objects of satire.
- When you encounter adult jokes, place them first in their historical context, then judge their literary function.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book in the same style as The Human Comedy?
Does the book contain content unsuitable for young readers?
Is the English edition difficult to read?
Can I read just a few of the stories?
Comments
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About the author
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist best known for his vast series La Comédie humaine. The library holds 143 of his works, including Father Goriot, Lost Illusions, Eugénie Grandet, and several volumes of La Comédie humaine. His writing is distinguished by dense detail, a large cast of characters, and an intricate social network, often linking separate works through recurring figures to portray nineteenth-century French society. He excelled at depicting the power of desire, ambition, and money through precise settings and strong narrative tension, and he exerted a lasting influence on later realist fiction. Beyond the broad outline of his life, public information is limited, so this note focuses on the themes and style of his works.
