Balzac's Lives (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781681374499)

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honor de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.

Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh--entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes--that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Author: Peter Brooks
ISBN-10: 1681374498
ISBN-13: 9781681374499
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Language: English
Published: 10/06/2020
Pages: 280
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/25/2020
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2020

About the Author
Peter Brooks has been teaching and writing about Honoré de Balzac for many years. Among his books are the nonfiction volumes The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, as well as two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor's Body. In 2014 Brooks edited a collection of Balzac's stories for New York Review Books, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale.