New York Review Books, Belletristik, The Memoirs Of Two Young Wives (Englisch, Honor� de Balzac, 2018)

Honoré de Balzac (1799&ndash 1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collè ge de Vendô me and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, La Comé die humaine, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Pè re Goriot, Eugé nie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died. Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska&ndash Lincoln the author, most recently, of The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction and the translator of some twenty works of (mostly) contemporary French prose by authors such as Marie NDiaye, É ric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His translation of Claude Simon&rsquo s The Jardin des Plantes won the French-American Foundation&rsquo s annual translation prize in 2001. Morris Dickstein is a distinguished professor emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Great Depression, and Why Not Say What Happened, a memoir.