Moonlight by Guy De Maupassant

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world’s greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.

Often described as the father of the modern short story, there is perhaps no other writer more closely associated with the form than Guy de Maupassant. Included here is his most famous story, ’Boule de Suif’, as well as tales of love, such as the brilliant ’Happiness’, and the supernatural, like the chilling ’The Horla’.

Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy in 1850. In addition to his six novels, which include Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre et Jean (1888), he wrote hundreds of short stories, the most famous of which is ’Boule de suif’. By the late 1870s, he began to develop the first signs of syphilis, and in 1891 he was committed to an asylum in Paris, having tried to commit suicide. He died there two years later.