Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was born in Normandy to a middle-class family that had adopted the noble "de" prefix only a generation earlier. An indifferent student, Maupassant enlisted in the army during the Franco-Prussian War--staying only long enough to acquire an intense dislike for all things military--and then went on to a career as a civil servant. His entrée into the literary world was eased by Gustave Flaubert, who had been a childhood playmate of his mother's and who took the young man under his wing, introducing him into salon society. The bulk of Maupassant's published works, including more than three hundred short stories and six novels, were written between 1880 and 1890, a period in which he also contributed to several Parisian daily newspapers. Among his best-known works are the novels Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean and the fantastic tale Le Horla; above all, he is celebrated for his stories, which transformed and defined the genre for years. In 1892, after attempting suicide to escape the hallucinations and headaches brought on by syphilis, Maupassant was committed to an asylum. He died eighteen months later.

Richard Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, his third volume of poems. For New York Review Books he has translated Maupassant's Alien Hearts, Honoré de Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, and Marc Fumaroli's When the World Spoke French.