BEST SHORT STORIES: MAUPASSANT - Wordsworth

Guy de Maupassant is a master of the short story. This collection reflects his remarkable diversity, with stories that vary in theme and tone, and range from the tragedy and satire to comedy and farce. With a simplicity of style that masks complex philosophy, Maupassant can iluminate an entire code of values by means of a few telling details. He exposes the brutality of war and the hypocrisy it spawns, and depicts the petty limitations, the dissimulations and the vanities inherent at differents levels of society. His stories are linked by a trenchant irony and by a preoccupation with the frailty of human nature and the futility of so many lives.