No adequate biography of Honoré de Balzac has yet been written ; a fact somewhat strange, considering the interest and attractiveness of the subject and the abundance of the material available. Of ...

BALZAC—Rene Benjamin—Knopf ($5). Fiction could be, has been defined as imaginary biography. Biography in its latest form could be defined as imaginary fiction. Into this definition fits the work ...

The 1830 novella “Gobseck” from his series of “The Human Comedy” and the 1836 novel “The Old Maid,” both rendered into Persian by Mohammad-Jafar Pouyandeh have been published by Now Publications. The ...

In our era of boxed-set, television bingeing, it’s astonishing there hasn’t been a revival of Honoré de Balzac’s “Human Comedy.” Did the conclusion of “The Wire” leave you bereft? Here’s a serial that ...

The novelist and short story-writer Honoré de Balzac has long been a fixture in the Penguin Classics range, bound between attractive covers that have been updated, with different illustrations and ...

Fueled by endless cups of coffee, French author Honoré de Balzac produced more than 90 novels and short stories peopled by 2,400-plus characters during his lifetime (1799-1850). “Balzac’s Lives,” a ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In the mid-1840s, in a melancholy mood about the series of modernisations he was witnessing in Paris, Honoré de ...

When a strange new social phenomenon develops, people frequently wonder, “What would Tom Wolfe make of this?” Fortunately we have just been given a very Wolfean take on a distressing aspect of ...

Art historian’s dissection of famous work is as much about the painting as his decades-long obsession with it.