Honore de Balzac - Collected Works (40 books)

* Honore de Balzac - Collected Works (40 books)

HONORÉ de BALZAC (1799–1850) , a French novelist and playwright, was one of the most influential figures of nineteenth-century French literature and one of the great architects of the modern realist tradition.  Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the rise of the bourgeoisie, Balzac sought to capture society in all its complexity—its ambitions, hypocrisies, struggles, and moral contradictions.  His work reflects a deep fascination with money, power, and social mobility, and he approached literature with the ambition of a historian and the eye of a sociologist.

Balzac’s magnum opus was a monumental cycle of interlinked short stories and novels collectively entitled LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE , which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.   Rather than isolated works, these texts form a single literary universe in which characters reappear across different novels, allowing Balzac to portray French society as a living, evolving organism.  This project aimed to depict every social class, from impoverished laborers to aristocrats and financiers, making La Comédie humaine one of the most ambitious undertakings in world literature.

Among Balzac’s principal works, LE PÈRE GORIOT (1835) occupies a central place for its depiction of Parisian ambition and moral compromise.  LOST ILLUSIONS (1837–1843) examines the corrupting influence of Parisian society and the publishing world on a young poet’s ideals, while its continuation, A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW (1838–1847), reveals the criminal and financial networks operating beneath respectable appearances.  In EUGÉNIE GRANDET (1833), Balzac turns to provincial life to examine greed, emotional repression, and the tyranny of money.  He also incorporated philosophical and symbolic elements into his realism, most notably in THE WILD ASS'S SKIN (1831), where a magical talisman that grants wishes at the cost of its owner’s life becomes a metaphor for desire and self-destruction.  In later works such as COUSIN BETTE (1846), he presents a bleak vision of revenge, obsession, and the disintegration of family and social bonds in modern Paris.

Balzac’s meticulous descriptions, recurring characters, and broad social analysis influenced many subsequent novelists such as Proust, Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, Faulkner, Kerouac, Calvino, and philosophers such as Marx and Engels, the latter of whom wrote: "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together."


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

== NOVELS ==

* A Harlot High and Low [tr. Heppenstall] (Penguin, 1970)
* A Murky Business [tr. Hunt] (Penguin, 1982) – PDF
* Black Sheep [tr. Adamson] (Penguin, 1970)
* Cousin Bette [tr. Raine] (Modern Library, 2002) – PDF
* Cousin Bette [tr. Raphael] (Oxford, 1998)
* Cousin Bette: Part 1 of Poor Relations [tr. Crawford] (Penguin, 2004)
* Cousin Pons: Part 2 of Poor Relations [tr. Hunt] (Penguin, 1968)
* Eugénie Grandet [tr. Bair] (Bantam, 1994) – PDF
* Eugénie Grandet [tr. Crawford] (Penguin, 2004)
* Eugénie Grandet [tr. Marriage] (Knopf, 2000)
* Eugénie Grandet [tr. Raphael] (Oxford, 2003) – PDF
* History of the Thirteen [tr. Hunt] (Penguin, 1974)
* Lost Illusions [tr. Hunt] (Penguin, 2004)
* Lost Illusions [tr. MacKenzie] (Minnesota, 2020)
* Lost Illusions [tr. Wormeley] (Barnes & Noble, 2009)
* Lost Souls [tr. MacKenzie] (Minnesota, 2020)
* Memoirs of Two Young Wives [tr. Stump] (NYRB, 2018)
* Old Goriot [tr. Crawford] (Penguin, 1951)
* Old Man Goriot [tr. McCannon] (Penguin, 2011)
* Père Goriot [tr. Krailsheimer] (Oxford, 1991) – PDF
* Père Goriot [tr. Marriage] (Barnes & Noble, 2005)
* The Lily in the Valley [tr. Bush] (NYRB, 2024)
* The Wrong Side of Paris [tr. Stump] (Modern Library, 2004)
* Ursule Mirouet [tr. Adamson] (Penguin, 2015)
* The Wild Ass's Skin [tr. Constantine] (Oxford, 2012)
* The Wild Ass's Skin [tr. Hunt] (Penguin, 1977)

== NOVELLAS ==

* Colonel Chabert [tr. Cosman] (New Directions, 1997)
* Girl with the Golden Eyes [tr. Collier] (Oxford, 2012)
* Girl with the Golden Eyes [tr. Cosman] (NYRB, 2025)
* Girl with the Golden Eyes [tr. Mandell] (Melville House, 2005)
* Sarrasine [tr. Carter] (Hesperus, 2025)
* The Unknown Masterpiece and Gambara [tr. Howard] (NYRB, 2001)

== SHORT FICTION ==

* Droll Stories (Skyhorse, 2015)
* The Human Comedy: Selected Stories [ed. Brooks] (NYRB, 2014)
* My Journey from Paris to Java [tr. Winkleman] (EDM, 2010)
* Selected Short Stories [tr. Raphael] (Penguin, 2005)

== PLAYS ==

* The Negro (Le Nègre] [tr. Cheyne & Watts] (Liverpool, 2014) – PDF

== NON-FICTION ==

* Analytical Studies (Project Gutenberg, 2023)
* The Physiology of Marriage [intro. Marcus] (Johns Hopkins, 1997)  – PDF^

== ANTHOLOGY ==

* Collected Works (Delphi Classics, 2012)


PDF^ courtesy of @Mohamed5438


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