The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922)—one of the great literary figures of the modern age—ranks alongside such innovative authors as Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka. Proust is best known for his celebrated, influential, and monumental cyclic novel Remembrance of Things Past, the focus and culmination of his literary ambition.

But before committing to this lifelong endeavor, he wrote short stories, publishing most of them in 1896 in a collection titled Pleasures and Days, with a preface by Nobel Prize-winner Anatole France. It represents the only other book Proust published during his lifetime.

Much like Joyce’s Dubliners, the individual stories fuse into a mosaic reflecting–and reacting to—various aspects of fin-de-siècle Paris itself, the coalescing presence in Pleasures and Days. These highly original, lean narratives manifest the same qualities that distinguish the seven-volume Remembrance: the precarious mental and reotic nuances of love; the fragile mysteries of time passing and time past; deft, humorous characterizations and psychological epiphanies; vivid, tongue-in-cheek descriptions of Paris, its sumptuous wealth and decadence; and its citizens’ sexual confusion and amorous follies.

In The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, award-winning translator Joachim Neugroschel offers readers a new translation of Pleasures and Days, the first in over fifty years, and one that fully renders the vitality and delicate irony of the original French. In addition, this collection includes six stories previously uncollected and never before available in English.

The resulting volume is both a perfect introduction to Marcel Proust—particularly for readers daunted by the mammoth undertaking required of Remembrance—and a work of enduring artistry in its own right.