"The great thing about work this entertaining is that it's still exciting nearly 200 years on." –Nicholas Lezard,
The Guardian "These tales provide the reader a healthy introduction to Balzac's famous hyperbole, his melodrama, and his extended descriptions and explanations where nothing goes unsaid. We don't read Balzac for his refined style; rather, his genius lies in the sheer ambition of his reach, the vastness of his grasp." –
Publishers Weekly "The characters and sentences still leap from the page as if they were trapped there just seconds ago. It's just choosing where to begin....Happily, in
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, Peter Brooks has managed to capture this enormous range and more by plucking a mere nine of the Frenchmen's best tales. There is a good range on display here, as broad as the Napoleonic Empire. Dandies and duchesses discuss the decline of aristocratic mores at a dinner party in "Another Study of Womankind." In "A Passion in the Desert," a soldier lost in the Sahara stumbles upon an oasis, which he discovers is inhabited by a panther. Out of such tales one can see how Balzac was the great-grandfather to writers as diverse as Colette and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry." –
The Boston Globe "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together." –Friedrich Engels
"In Balzac, every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will." –Charles Baudelaire
"Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs together perfectly." –Henry James
"Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense." –V. S. Pritchett
"Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius." –André Maurois
