Annoted Cover 2010-full-correct spine.indd - Penguin Group

honoré de balzaC
1799 – 1850, French
The Black Sheep
Translated with an Introduction by
Donald Adamson
Two brothers—one a dashing, handsome
ex-soldier, the other a sensitive artist—
struggle to recover the family inheritance
in a novel that explores the devastation
that poverty can bring.
344 pp. 978-0-14-044237-3 $16.00
Cousin Bette
Translated with an Introduction by
Marion Ayton Crawford
Vividly bringing to life the rift between
the old world and the new, Cousin Bette
is an incisive study of vengeance, and the
culmination of The Human Comedy.
448 pp. 978-0-14-044160-4 $14.00
Penguin Readers Guide Available
Cousin Pons
Translated with an Introduction by
Herbert J. Hunt
The companion novel to Cousin Bette,
Cousin Pons offers a diametrically opposite
view of the nature of family relationships,
focusing on a mild, harmless old man.
336 pp. 978-0-14-044205-2 $17.00
honoré de balzaC
18 Penguin ClassiCs
Eugénie Grandet
Translated with an Introduction by
Marion Ayton Crawford
The love of money and the passionate
pursuit of it, a major theme in The Human
Comedy, is brilliantly depicted in the story
of Grandet and his obsession with achieving
power.
256 pp. 978-0-14-044050-8 $14.00
A Harlot High and Low
Translated with an Introduction by
Rayner Heppenstall
Finance, fashionable society, and the
intrigues of the underworld and the police
system form the heart of this powerful
novel, which introduces the satanic genius
Vautrin, one of the greatest villains in
world literature.
560 pp. 978-0-14-044232-8 $16.00
History of the Thirteen
Translated with an Introduction by
Herbert J. Hunt
This trilogy of stories—“Ferragus: Chief
of the Companions of Duty,” “The
Duchesse De Langeais,” and “The Girl
with the Golden Eyes”—purporting to
be the history of a secret society, laid the
foundation for Balzac’s Scenes of Parisian
Life and is a stunning evocation of all
ranks of society.
392 pp. 978-0-14-044301-1 $16.00
The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France.
After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked
as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration
with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went
on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-
century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with
Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French
romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess
Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.