This collection of French short stories in translation expands our idea of French writing by including new stories by women writers and by authors of Francophone origin. Spanning the centuries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth, the collection opens with a rumbustious tale from the Marquis de Sade, takes in the masters of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal and Balzac to Maupassant, and reaches to Quebec, Africa, and the French Caribbean in the twentieth century. Women writers include relatively well known figures such as Renee Vivien, Colette, and Beauvoir, and newer writers...

First published in 1988, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir concentrates specifically on the novels of the famous 20th Century French writer, Simone de Beauvoir. Her novels are popular with both the students and general readers of literature and philosophy, and they will welcome this authoritative introduction to Beauvoir's fiction. The author examines Beauvoir's choice of narrative strategies and interprets them both in relation to the sexual politics of writing and in relation to the place which the constraints of history, class and gender increasingly play in the texts. All quotations are...