Cooper Square Publishers April 2001, hc $25.95

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
by Marcel Proust
translated by Joachim Neugroschel, introduction by Roger Shattuck

Here is Proust's first book, Pleasures and Days, a collection of nine short stories about amorous lives in fin de siècle Paris, in its first translation in over 50 years, an approximately forty pages of stories previously uncollected. Proust probes the precarious mental and erotic nuances of love, the frail mysteries of time passing and time past in highly original, surprising tales. Like James Joyce's Dubliners, in the various sketches and stories the metropolis itself plays a lead role, while each human character presents another emotional angle.