The recent Penguin Pocket Classics series is good. This is the second of the French authors I have read in the series (there are six). I was struck by Maupassant's range of topics and how he waxes and wanes through tragedy and comedy but always with a clear picture of human imperfections and the challenges we, as humans, deal with on a daily basis. I couldn't help but think of Hemingway and how he draws out a particular human condition and builds a tragic story around it. I wanted to find out more about the influence of Maupassant on Hemingway so I read the introduction to Stoltzfus' (2012) Hemingway and French Writers where he states that Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, in his foreword to a French translation of A Farewell to Arms, compares Hemingway to Maupassant. A little further reading led me to an article by Jean-Paul Sartre in the August 1946 edition of The Atlantic entitled "American Novelists in French Eyes". Although Sartre does not make the direct comparison à la Rochelle, it is clear that Hemingway was influenced by the French authors Maupassant and Zola (even if Sartre and Hemingway weren't quite the fans of fascism that Rochelle was to become). In the book, Maupassant's stories are supported by comprehensive notes that I will return to time and again, either for details of authors, artists and playwrights, or for the descriptions of places, architecture, variants of horse-drawn vehicles, and trains. It took me some time to get through the book, not because it was tedious, but because it deserves to be slow-read. ( )

Some stories were beautiful, others were incredibly sad (cause people suck), and the rest were just "meh." ( )

A solid if unspectacular collection by Maupassant. Some stories stand out more than others (ranging from the more comic Cockcrow to the more sinister La Horla) but there are no real stunners in this collection either. Nothing quite so perfect as what Chekhov wrote or as emotive as anything by Carver - but that's tough company to hang with!

There is something very "modern" about these short stories though. Maupassant's prose is wonderfully clear and direct and It is impressive that he managed to write so many short stories, of good quality, in such a condensed amount of time. It's tough to nudge this book up to four stars however, because he made many of the points raised in this collection with much more force in his novels.

Thus, this is a collection worth reading but it's not amongst the great short story compilations and nor does it contain the author's best pieces of writing - read his longer fiction for that. ( )