The Oxford Book of French Short Stories » (New Edition)

Dr. Fallaize is Fellow of French at St. John's College, Oxford, and editor of Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 1998), French Women's Writing: Recent Fiction (Macmillan, 1993), and French Fiction in the Mitterand Years. She is a co-editor of the journal French Studies.

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 rambunctious 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 such as Assia Djebar, Christiane Baroche, and Annie Saumont. The French short story is a rich and diverse medium, but all the stories selected share a common characteristic: they make reading exciting.