This collection includes six masterpieces from French literature, all presented in new translations:

The Flowers of Evil: Dual-Language Edition by Charles Baudelaire

Anthony Mortimer, already praised for his virtuoso translations of Petrarch, Dante and Villon, has produced a new version that not only respects the sense and the form of the original French, but also makes powerful English poetry in its own right.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Presented in a new translation by Christopher Moncrieff, this edition contains extra material including some photographs, notes and a select bibliography

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Exercises in Style retells this apparently unremarkable tale ninety-nine times, employing a variety of styles, ranging from sonnet to cockney to mathematical formula. This edition contains a foreword by Umberto Eco and an essay by Italo Calvino

Pleasures and Days by Marcel Proust

Pleasures and Days takes the reader on a journey through the high-society circles of fin-de-siècle Paris, presenting the lives, loves and attitudes of a host of unforgettable characters. Contains a foreword by A.N. Wilson

Pantagruel and Gargantua by François Rabelais

But these bawdy and boisterous tales, with their fixation on food and faeces, are not just entertaining yarns, as François Rabelais, one of the foremost humanists of the sixteenth century, parodies medieval learning, lambasts the established church authority and develops his own ideal visions for the ordering of society.

Candide by Voltaire

Presented in a new translation by Sander Berg, Candide is an exhilarating picaresque romp and a biting satire by one of the Enlightenment’s major figures that still resonates to this day.