The Unknown Masterpiece (New York Review Books Classics)

Honoré De Balzac

ISBN 10: 0940322749 / ISBN 13: 9780940322745

Published by NYRB Classics, 2001

About this Item

Book is in good condition. Minimal signs of wear. It May have markings or highlights, but kept to only a few pages. May not come with supplemental materials if applicable.

Seller Inventory # LFM.7WGD

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Unknown Masterpiece (New York Review Books Classics)
• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0940322749
• ISBN 13: 9780940322745
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

A New York Review Books Original

One of Honoré de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius—or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton's words, a "fable of modern art."

Published here in a new translation by poet Richard Howard, "The Unknown Masterpiece" appears, as Balzac intended, with "Gambara," a grotesque and tragic novella about a musician undone by his dreams.

About the Author

Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine,which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) was the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, art critic for The Nation, and author of many books about art and philosophy. He coined the term “artworld.”