Currently spoken by almost 250 million people in Pakistan and India and the second most widely spoken language in Britain, Urdu has one of the richest literatures of all south Asian languages. The modern Urdu poets presented in this book offer a fascinating range of forms and styles that grew out of that tradition, as well as a complex commentary on the experience--personal, religious, cultural, political--of the issues and dilemmas of the twentieth century. In his introduction, M. A. R. Habib outlines the history of Urdu literature, identifies the major poets associated with the classical...

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Venerande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule's suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.

Set in prerevolutionary France, Histoire d'Ernestine tells of the love between an innocent young woman and an aristocrat. Ernestine, German-born and orphaned, is an apprentice painter putting the finishing touches on a portrait when the marquis de Clemengis, elegant and handsome, enters the studio. Recognizing him as the subject of the portrait, she gestures for him to be seated and goes on working, looking back and forth between him and his likeness. The world-weary aristocrat is smitten.

In graceful, understated prose, Marie Riccoboni shows how her heroine learns to...