Alien Hearts
  • Published: 15 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590172605
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $36.00

Alien Hearts

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Alien Hearts was the last book that Guy de Maupassant finished before his death at the early age of forty-three. It is the most original and psychologically penetrating of his several novels, and the one in which he attains a truly tragic perception of the wounded human heart. André Mariolle is a rich, handsome, gifted young man who cannot settle on what to do with himself. Madame de Burne, a glacially dazzling beauty, wants Mariolle to attend her exclusive salon for artists, composers, writers, and other intellectuals. At first Mariolle keeps his distance, but then he hits on the solution to all his problems: caring for nothing in particular, he will devote himself to being in love; Madame de Burne will be his everything. Soon lover and beloved are equally lost within a hall of mirrors of their common devising.

Richard Howard’s new English translation of this complex and brooding novel—the first in more than a hundred years—reveals the final, unexpected flowering of a great French realist’s art.
  • Published: 15 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590172605
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 200
  • RRP: $36.00
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About the author

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy in 1850. At his parents' separation he stayed with his mother, who was a friend of Flaubert. As a young man he was lively and athletic, but the first symptoms of syphilis appeared in the late 1870s. By this time Maupassant had become Flaubert's pupil in the art of prose. On the publication of the first short story to which he put his name, 'Boule de suif', he left his job in the civil service and his temporary alliance with the disciples of Zola at Médan, and devoted his energy to professional writing. In the next eleven years he published dozens of articles, nearly three hundred stories and six novels, the best known of which are A Woman's Life, Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean. He led a hectic social life, lived up to his reputation for womanizing and fought his disease. By 1889 his friends saw that his mind was in danger, and in 1891 he attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum in Paris, where he died two years later.

Also by Guy de Maupassant

Mod Lib The Necklace
Moonlight
Selected Stories
Like Death
Femme Fatale
A Parisian Affair and Other Stories
Bel-ami
See all

Praise for Alien Hearts

  • "The author of 'Boule de Suif,' 'Bel Ami,' 'Notre Coeur' [Alien Hearts], and so many other popular works of fiction was not an Academician, but the Immortals held him in esteem, not only because he could tell his stories well, but also by reason of the fact that he told them in that faultless French which he had studied when under the literary tutelage of Gustave Flaubert." -New York Times
  • "[Maupassant] is brilliantly clever." -Henry James
  • "He is the best of the popular novelists." -Arthur Symons
  • "[Maupassant] is so relentlessly artistic that he puts the fear of philosophy in your heart." -New York Times
  • "Maupassant is the world's most accomplished of narrators." -Joseph Conrad
  • Praise for Afloat:
  • "Douglas Parmee's fresh new translation brings to light a book that, more so than any of his renowned short stories, shows Maupassant the man, as he might have been known to contemporary readers of his copious journalism in fin de siecle Paris." -NY Sun
  • "In this deceptively simple way, he is a heart-stopping writer...like all the best travel books, it embraces reflections on a variety of subjects unconnected with travel...It has spontaneity, gaiety and freshness." --Daily Telegraph