Emma Bovary, the bored wife of a French provincial doctor, scans her solitude with desperate eyes, like a shipwrecked sailor searching for a white sail on the distant horizon. And when Emma's ship finally comes in, it carries with it vast and tragic consequences upon which her own life and the lives of those around her are wrecked. This new translation by Francis Steegmuller was published as a part of the centenary celebration of the original publishing...

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories...

Sunday: A Sunday in May a Sunday like any other at the popular inn on the Riviera, except that this is the day Emile, the chef and proprietor, is preparing to murder his wife.... Little man from Archangel: Jonas Milk, the child of Russian-Jewish refugees, owns a bookshop in a little French town. One day his promiscuous wife disappears, not for the first time, but this time she has taken his valuable stamp collection. As she fails to reappear, and...