The Collected Stories of Colette beings together in one volume for the first time in any language the comprehensive collection of short stories by the novelist known worldwide as Colette, and now acknowledged, with Proust, as the most original French narrative writer of the first half of our century. of the one hundred stories gathered here, thirty-one appear for the first time in English and another twenty-nine have been newly translated for this volume.
“Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving.” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times
“This large collection of her stories allows us to share her exhilaration and to sample the pleasure of her prose . . . no other woman seems to have had as much lived experience to draw upon or as much sexual sophistication . . . The voice of worldly feminine wisdom runs through her stories.” —Phyllis Rose, The New York Times Book Review
“Like a table spread with the fruit and wine she celebrated in her books: 'Late-ripening cherries, rosy peaches, thin-skinned Marseilles figs, misty hot-house grapes and champagne shuddering in carafes of heavy crystal.' A sumptuous display.” —Patricia Blake, Time