{"product_id":"9781943813568","title":"The Death of Balzac","description":"\u003cp\u003eHere, presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of Octave Mirbeau’s darkest works: a fictionalized account of the death of the giant of French letters, ­Honoré de Balzac.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAmong his journalistic endeavors, Mirbeau contributed a large number of short stories to the newspapers in the \u003cem\u003efin-de-siècle \u003c\/em\u003eperiod, and he honed his skill in that kind of work to near-perfection. Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be “true,” and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction, and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ­ambiguous kind, however, are quite as brazen or as seductively ­persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up \u003cem\u003eThe Death of Balzac\u003c\/em\u003e, which, seen purely as a literary exercise, is a masterpiece of sorts, in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration. It is a gripping and affectively powerful story, artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Snuggly Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055881208048,"sku":"9781943813568","price":11.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781943813568_p0.jpg?v=1763787189","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781943813568","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}