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• "A Simple Soul (Un cœur simple)" by Gustave Flaubert (1877)

  4 June by Gustave Flaubert

  Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) is generally considered as one of the greatest Franch-language stylists of all time because of the elegant, clear and incisive quality of his prose.
  During his lifetime he published just four novels (two "mainstream" novels and two historical novels) and one (...)

• Herman Melville’s masterful story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)

  31 May by Herman Melville

  The narrator-lawyer recounts how a young man in his office, the mildest and most inconspicuous person one could imagine, demonstrated the most determined and persistent refusal to obey instructions in a surprising and surprisingly effective way by simply stating in the calmest of tones: “I would (...)

• "Lalie’s Story", from Zola’s novel "L’Assommoir" (1877)

  8 May 2020 by Emile Zola

  Lalie is an eight-year-old girl living in the room next to Gervaise, the central character of Emile Zola’s novel "L’Assommoir" about life in a working-class district of Paris in the 1850s and 60s.
  She is one of the most unforgettable characters in that masterwork, although she only appears in (...)

• "The Bottle Imp" (1891) - a South Sea fable by Robert Louis Stevenson

  11 May 2019 by Robert Louis Stevenson

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), author of the immortal Treasure Island (1883) and other notable works such as Travels with a Donkey (1879), Kidnapped (1886) and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), was born and educated in Scotland and remained deeply attached to his (...)