The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories by Peter Collier

The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories by Peter Collier

'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.

Peter Collier has previously translated Zola's Germinal for Oxford World's Classics. Patrick Coleman's books include editions of Rousseau's Confessions and Discourses on Inequality and Constant's Adolphe for Oxford World's Classics, and Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer (Oxford, 2011). He has recently edited Helen Constantine's translation of Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin (forthcoming in Oxford World's Classics, June 2012).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199571284
ISBN 10	0199571287
Title	The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories
Author	Patrick Coleman
Series	Oxford World's Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2012-11-08
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.