The Unknown Masterpiece

By Honore de Balzac
Introduction by Arthur C. Danto
Translated by Richard Howard

By Honore de Balzac
Introduction by Arthur C. Danto
Translated by Richard Howard

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The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac

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Paperback $15.95

Aug 31, 2000 | 160 Pages

Ebook $9.99

Jan 26, 2011 | 160 Pages

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    About The Unknown Masterpiece

    A New York Review Books Original

    One of Honoré de Balzac’s most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one’s perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius—or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton’s words, a "fable of modern art."

    Published here in a new translation by poet Richard Howard, "The Unknown Masterpiece" appears, as Balzac intended, with "Gambara," a grotesque and tragic novella about a musician undone by his dreams.

    About The Unknown Masterpiece

    Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine,which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.

    Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including works by Gide, Stendhal, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, and de Gaulle. Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

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    Praise

    “The greatest novelist of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time.” —The New York Times

    “The hero of The Unknown Masterpiece, Frenhofer, is one of Balzac’s archetypal artists. . .” —TheWashington Post

    Product Details

    Paperback
    Published by NYRB Classics
    Aug 31, 2000 | 160 Pages | 5 x 8 | ISBN 9780940322745

    Ebook
    Published by NYRB Classics
    Jan 26, 2011 | 160 Pages | ISBN 9781590174159

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