Detailed
Description |
|
Tri-part work comprised of collections of stories by different authors. There is a volume title page with the heading Biblioteka Ivrit for all the house of Israel and a background fo shelves of books. That page states that it is the thirty-fifth volume in the series, although, as each entry in the book is recorded bibliographically by its individual title it is not possible to ascertain what the complete series consists of. Within this volume each part has its own title page. The first collection of stories, the only edition of this work, is by Lipman Levin (1877-1946). It is followed by the collected writings of S. D. Haurenstein, consting of twenty-three entries. The last part of the book is the most famous, being the stories of the noted French author, Guy De-Maupassant, translated into Hebrew by Nahum Seloshitz. There is an oval portrait of De-Maupassant and a lengthy biography of him prior to his well known and popular stories.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. As a protégé of Flaubert, his short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught, emerge changed - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s. n 1880 he published his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which met with an instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece that will endure." This was Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War, and was followed by short stories such as "Deux Amis," "Mother Savage," and "Mademoiselle Fifi." The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life. Made famous by his first short story, he worked methodically and produced two or sometimes four volumes annually. He combined talent and practical business sense, which made him wealthy. In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier; it reached its twelfth edition within two years; in 1883 he finished his first novel, Une Vie (translated into English as A Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year. In his novels, he concentrated all his observations scattered in his short stories. His second novel Bel-Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months.
|
