This collection of stories by French (or French language) authors was published in 1960. It contains stories from the 15th to mid-20th centuries. I had not read a single one of these stories before though I've heard of all but a couple of the authors. Some stories, by very well-known and distinguished writers, did not stay in my mind. Some of them I found incomprehensible such as the modernist "6 stories in 3 lines," or just plain irritating such as Beckett's "Stories and Texts, III" (and by the way, I realize Beckett wrote in French, but really, ending a book of Great French stories with him?!)

The stories that stood out for me were Anatole France's "The Procurator of Judaea" with its little twist at the end, though the reason I liked it so much is probably because I had heard this story and its twist retold by Professor Vladimir Markov in a Russian literature seminar at UCLA. There were only a few graduate students in the class at the time, held in his office, and I can still see Prof. Markov, modest and elegant in his suit and tie, reenacting the story in two or three sentences. His charmingly ironic telling of it somehow stuck with me these 30 years. The story that I most enjoyed was by an author I had never heard of: Jules Supervielle. "The Child of the High Seas" is an eery story, part ghost-story, part-fantasy. It had a wonderful other-worldliness to it.

The book itself, paperbook, 1st edition from 1960, is falling apart. I lost the table of contents, and now most of the pages are falling out. I think I'll have to discard it. The book is an introduction to (mostly) great French writers, however, I wonder whether these stories are actually the best examples of these authors' writing.

Contains:
"The Chaste Lover," by Anonymous;
"The Princess of Montpensier," by Comtesse de la Fayette;
"This is Not a Story," by Denis Diderot;
"Dead Man's Combe," by Charles Nodier;
"La Grande Breteche," by Honore de Balzac;
"Pandora," by Gerard de Nerval;
"The Generous Gamester," by Charles Baudelaire;
"Hautot and His Son," by Guy de Maupassant;
"Torture Through Hope," by Villiers de L'Isle Adam;
"The White Water-Lily," by Stephane Mallarme;
"The Procurator of Judaea," by Anatole France;
"6 Stories in Three Lines," by Felix Feneon;
"The Japanese Family," "The Serial Novel--Again," by Max Jacob;
"The Little Bouilloux Girl," by Collette;
"The Child of the High Seas," by Jules Supervielle;
"The Room," by Jean-Paul Sartre;
"The Guest," by Albert Camus;
"The Walker-through-Walls," by Marcel Ayme;
"The Animals," by Pierre Gascar;
"Stories and Texts for Nothing, III," by Samuel Beckett ( )