The Unknown Masterpiece and Other Stories PDF Download

Author: Honoré Balzac
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486159094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Three of the author’s most highly regarded stories, newly translated: the title story, "An Episode During the Terror," and "Facino Cane."

Author: Honoré De Balzac
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174151
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine,which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work. Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an impetuous young sculptor falls in love with a diva of the Roman stage, but rapture turns to rage when he discovers the reality behind the seductiveness of the singer's voice. The ageing artist in The Unknown Masterpiece, obsessed with his creation of the perfect image of an ideal woman, tries to hide it from the jealous young student who is desperate for a glimpse of it. And in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the hero is a dandy whose attractiveness for the mysterious Paquita has an unexpected origin. These enigmatic and disturbing forays into the margins of madness, sexuality, and creativity show Balzac spinning fantastic tales as profound as any of his longer fictions. His mastery of the seductions of storytelling places these novellas among the nineteenth-century's richest explorations of art and desire. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Author: Fiona Davis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524742961
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In this captivating novel, New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis takes readers into the glamorous lost art school within Grand Central Terminal, where two very different women, fifty years apart, strive to make their mark on a world set against them. For most New Yorkers, Grand Central Terminal is a crown jewel, a masterpiece of design. But for Clara Darden and Virginia Clay, it represents something quite different. For Clara, the terminal is the stepping stone to her future. It is 1928, and Clara is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. Though not even the prestige of the school can override the public's disdain for a "woman artist," fiery Clara is single-minded in her quest to achieve every creative success—even while juggling the affections of two very different men. But she and her bohemian friends have no idea that they'll soon be blindsided by the looming Great Depression...and that even poverty and hunger will do little to prepare Clara for the greater tragedy yet to come. By 1974, the terminal has declined almost as sharply as Virginia Clay's life. Dilapidated and dangerous, Grand Central is at the center of a fierce lawsuit: Is the once-grand building a landmark to be preserved, or a cancer to be demolished? For Virginia, it is simply her last resort. Recently divorced, she has just accepted a job in the information booth in order to support herself and her college-age daughter, Ruby. But when Virginia stumbles upon an abandoned art school within the terminal and discovers a striking watercolor, her eyes are opened to the elegance beneath the decay. She embarks on a quest to find the artist of the unsigned masterpiece—an impassioned chase that draws Virginia not only into the battle to save Grand Central but deep into the mystery of Clara Darden, the famed 1920s illustrator who disappeared from history in 1931.

Author: Edwin Frank
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170779
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books. Here Toni Morrison celebrates a great Guinean storyteller whose novel of mystical adventure and surprising revelation transforms our image of Africa, while Susan Sontag raises the curtain on a distant summer when three of the greatest poets of the twentieth century exchanged love letters like no others. Here too John Updike analyzes the rare art of an English comic genius, Jonathan Lethem considers a hard-boiled and heartbreaking story of prison life, and Michael Cunningham uncovers the secrets of what may well be the finest short novel in modern American literature. Other contributors include such noted authors as Arthur C. Danto, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine Prose, Lucy Sante, Colm Tóibín, Eliot Weinberger, and James Wood. Lucid, polished, provocative, inspiring, these essays are models of critical appreciation, offering personal, impassioned, thoughtful responses to a wide range of wonderful books. Unknown Masterpieces is a treat for all lovers of great writing and a useful and stimulating guidebook for readers eager to venture off literature's beaten tracks. Eliot Weinberger on Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley Arthur C. Danto on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac John Updike on Seven Men by Max Beerbohm Jonathan Lethem on On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Toni Morrison on The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye Colm Tóibín on The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley Francine Prose on A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes Susan Sontag on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke Lucy Sante on Classic Crimes by William Roughead James Wood on The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin Elizabeth Hardwick on The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger Lydia Davis on The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal Michael Cunningham on The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Author: Florence Meurée
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
ISBN: 2808686641
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description
What should we learn from The Unknown Masterpiece, the philosophical short story about the powers of art? Find everything you need to know about this work in a complete and detailed reading sheet. You will find in this booklet: - A complete summary - A presentation of the main characters such as Frenhofer, Nicolas Poussin, Gillette and Porbus - An analysis of the specificities of the work: a two-faceted novel, a romantic conception of art, the question of mimesis and significant mythological references A reference analysis to quickly understand the meaning of the work.

Author: Walter Idlewild
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780998622606
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"In the delirious and vitalizing novel Catherine Lescault, alternative incarnations of Honoré de Balzac's classic characters from The Unknown Masterpiece enact romances of lunacy and obsession to dramatize their search for the reality of artistic creation. The novelists Frenhofer and Porbus, the painter and muse Gillette, the troubadour Nicolas, and the sculptor Houdon all strive to discover the secret of imbuing art with life, despite the voices of academic critics and students, peers and rivals, relatives and loved ones, and their own withering internal frailties. Some disciples may achieve the dream of allowing the ideal courtesan subject, Catherine Lescault herself, to breathe and live and love, while other artists' fixations lead into monomaniacal madness with unspeakably tragic consequences. Which interpretation will ultimately triumph: sculpture, paint, music, dance, acts on the stage, or words on the page?"--Back cover.

Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486408957
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Considered a founder of the realistic school of fiction, prolific French novelist Honor� de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote in meticulous detail, depicting ordinary and undistinguished lives in tales that nevertheless abounded in melodramatic plots and violent passions. This convenient dual-language volume includes six of Balzac's most highly regarded short stories: "An Episode During the Terror," a deftly told tale contrasting material poverty with spiritual riches; "A Passion in the Desert," inspired by Balzac's interest in the Near East and his fascination with Napoleon; "The Revolutionary Conscript," a critique of provincial life; "The Forsaken Woman," an intriguing study of female psychology and a how-to seduction manual; "The Unknown Masterpiece," which focuses on the conflict between an artist's commitment to his work and his relationship with the woman who loves him; and "Facino Cane," a tale of a destitute blind man's dreams of restoring his former wealth and power. Stanley Appelbaum has provided excellent, line-for-line English translations of the text, as well as an informative introduction and notes related to each story. This superb selection of tales by one of the world's great writers of fiction is sure to delight students and devotees of French language and literature.

Author: Dore Ashton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520073012
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Dore Ashton's masterly analysis of modern art grows out of a consideration of Balzac's brilliant and little known 'philosophic' story The Unknown Masterpiece in which the concerns of C�zanne, Picasso, and the abstract expressionists are strikingly prefigured. Balzac's fable is discussed not only within the context from which it emerged--early nineteenth-century romanticism--but also in its embodiment of various attitudes towards art. Ashton illuminates a web of associations linking Balzac to C�zanne, Rilke, Schoenberg, Kandinsky and Picasso as they struggle with the yearning to express the inexpressible, to make concrete the abstract. As Professor Ashton develops the conjectures of her book she reveals the interrelations of literature, music, and art and the basic problems which engage or beset the contemporary artist and those who seek to understand and appreciate contemporary art. This is a book of extreme originality which ranges so widely and offers such valuable insights that it forms an important contribution not only to the history of art and culture, but also to the history of ideas.

Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590515676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.