"Guy de Maupassant's Selected Works highlights the essential works of the famed writer in a masterful new translation. The tales are organized along predominant themes from Maupassant's body of work: nineteenth-century French society, the Franco-PrussianWar of 1870-71, and the supernatural. Maupassant skillfully crafts portraits of the daily struggles and unseen superstitions of nineteenth-century France. Readers of this edition will find explanatory footnotes and an introduction by the editor. The textof these twenty-eight stories and two novellas has been newly translated. "Contexts" looks at the many influences in Maupassant's life from politics and social types to women, love and marriage, the supernatural, and pessimism, illness and despair. In this section, readers will be presented with a collection of letters, articles, essays, and prefaces that examine these core themes. "Criticism" provides a comprehensive overview of early and modern commentary on Guy de Maupassant's body of work and the stories in this edition, including nineteenth-century reviews by contemporaires like Henry James and Joseph Conrad and numerous modern critical essays that follow the same thematic approach as the collection. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included."-- Born in Normandy, Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) is the author of over three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel Ami and Pierre et Jean . He is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the modern short story. Sandra Smith is the translator of Camus' The Stranger and Irène Nemirovsky's Suite Française , which won her the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation prize and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. She lives in New York. Robert Lethbridge is Emeritus Honorary Professor of nineteenth-century French Literature at Cambridge University and Professor Emeritus of French Language and Literature at the University of London. He was formerly Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is the author of Maupassant: ‘Pierre et Jean’ and has edited Pierre et Jean and Bel- Ami for Oxford University Press’s World Classics series. The majority of his publications have been devoted to the work of Émile Zola and the relationship between literature and the visual arts in late nineteenth-century France.