- Published: 25 February 2015
- ISBN: 9780141397504
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 64
- RRP: $9.99
A Simple Heart
Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary
One of 80 Little Black Classics - 80 books at 80 pence each to celebrate Penguin's 80th birthday
Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list - from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across many centuries
Beautifully designed, complete little books to be collected, shared and handed out as presents in a pick-and-mix fashion
In the same spirit as Penguin 60s, Penguin Great Ideas and other Penguin mini series, which have between them sold many millions of copies
In this short story, Dostoyevsky skilfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide
- Published: 25 February 2015
- ISBN: 9780141397504
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 64
- RRP: $9.99
Other books in the series
About the author
Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a doctor's daughter. After three unhappy years of studying law in Paris, an epileptic attack ushered him into a life of writing. Madame Bovary won instant acclaim upon book publication in 1857, but Flaubert's frank display of adultery in bourgeois France saw him go on trial for immorality, only narrowly escaping conviction. Both Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) were poorly received, and Flaubert's genius was not publicly recognized until Three Tales (1877). His reputation among his fellow writers, however, was more constant and those who admired him included Turgenev, George Sand, Victor Hugo and Zola. Flaubert's obsession with his art is legendary: he would work for days on a single page, obsessively attuning sentences, seeking always le mot juste in a quest for both beauty and precise observation. His style moved Edmund Wilson to say,'Flaubert, by a single phrase - a notation of some commonplace object - can convey all the poignance of human desire, the pathos of human defeat; his description of some homely scene will close with a dying fall that reminds one of great verse or music.' Flaubert died suddenly in May 1880, leaving his last work, Bouvard and Pécuchet, unfinished.