Stories by Foreign Authors

A series overview

In 1898, the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons put out a ten-volume series entitled Stories by Foreign Authors. Each book in the series is a collection of four to six works of European short fiction in English translation, focusing on a different country or region. The breakdown of the ten volumes is as follows. All ten books have been reviewed individually at Old Books by Dead Guys. Click on the links below to read the full reviews.

1. Stories by Foreign Authors: French I
2. Stories by Foreign Authors: French II
3. Stories by Foreign Authors: French III
4. Stories by Foreign Authors: German I
5. Stories by Foreign Authors: German II
6. Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish
7. Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian
8. Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
9. Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian
10. Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian

Altogether the ten volumes contain 51 stories by 48 authors, providing a broad and varied overview of European literature in the 19th century. The selections are a pleasant mix of household names (e.g. Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy), Nobel laureates (Bjørnson, France, Heyse, Maeterlinck, Sienkiewicz), lesser-known luminaries, and a few writers who have since faded into obscurity. The best books in the series are the French and Scandinavian volumes. The worst volume, by far, is the Russian volume. Though it features four literary superstars, the editors may well have chosen the most boring stories from each. Despite this one disappointment, the other nine volumes each have their own hidden treasures. If you are interested in classic literature—Romanticism, Naturalism, early Realism—this series is a great way to sample and discover new authors you may not have encountered before.

These books are in the public domain and can be read online and downloaded for free at various sources. For some unexplained reason, Project Gutenberg and Amazon do not have the three French volumes, though they do have the other seven. Wikisource has several volumes, including the French:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stories_by_Foreign_Authors

If you’re intimidated by the thought of reading ten volumes, you don’t have to, because Old Books by Dead Guys has already done it for you! Below is a list of the ten best stories in the series. These are the ones you just can’t miss.

“Christian Gellert’s Last Christmas” by Berthold Auerbach
from Stories by Foreign Authors: German II
When a peasant is touched by a passage of verse, he makes a pilgrimage to a local university to thank the author in person.

“The Massacre of the Innocents” by Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish, Greek, Belgian, Hungarian
After a farmer is robbed and his wife and daughters killed, the enraged inhabitants of a Belgian village attack the Spanish soldiers responsible for the act.

“San Pantaleone” by Gabriele D’Annunzio
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian
When the sky inexplicably turns blood red, a mob of fanatically religious folk seek solace in their priest, their relics, and their superstitions.

“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant
from Stories by Foreign Authors: French I
A poor woman longs for the luxury and status of a high-class life. When her husband is invited to a ball by his employers, she sees the chance to live her dream, if but for one night.

“Laurette or the Red Seal” by Alfred de Vigny
from Stories by Foreign Authors: French III
An old soldier recalls a story from his naval days when he captained a ship transporting prisoners to the penal colony of Cayenne, Guiana.

“When Father Brought Home the Lamp” by Juhani Aho (Finnish)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
When a poor family becomes the first in their town to purchase an oil lamp, it becomes an immediate status symbol, elevating them in the eyes of their neighbors.

“The Philosopher’s Pendulum” by Rudolph Lindau
from Stories by Foreign Authors: German I
After having lived a life of disappointment and heartbreak, a man adopts a personal philosophy by which he expects nothing and therefore feels nothing.

“The Substitute” by François Coppée

from Stories by Foreign Authors: French II

A petty criminal, raised in reform schools and prisons, decides to turn his life around, gets a real job, and forms a close bond with a new friend.

“Moors and Christians” by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish
The owner of a historic estate finds an old parchment on his property. He suspects it to be a treasure map, but, unable to read Arabic, he must first have it translated.

“The Railroad and the Churchyard” by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norwegian)
from Stories by Foreign Authors: Scandinavian
Two close friends suddenly find themselves at odds in a power struggle over local politics. Matters reach a boiling point with the proposal of a new railroad through town.

I have recently learned that this series was a follow up to two previous series published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Stories by American Authors and Stories by English Authors. Together they add up to twenty more volumes of 19th-century literature, all available for free download from Amazon or Project Gutenberg. Look for them in upcoming posts at Old Books by Dead Guys.

Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser

Beats the heck out of Sister Carrie
Jennie Gerhardt is a young woman of eighteen years of age, the daughter of a poor family living in Columbus, Ohio. Her father scrapes by with a series of odd jobs, but he can’t support seven children by himself, so Jennie and her mother call at a downtown hotel looking for housekeeping work. While cleaning at the hotel, they meet Senator Brander, a resident there, who hires the mother and daughter to do his washing. Brander, a charming and attractive man in his fifties who has never married, is immediately taken by Jennie’s unassuming but uncommon beauty. He takes an interest in her family and helps them out financially from time to time. Over the course of regular laundry deliveries, Jennie and Brander become more closely acquainted, and it soon becomes clear that, despite their difference in age and class, his interest in her is more than platonic. Jennie is a good girl, but how can she resist this attractive, charming, older man?

Though Theodore Dreiser is best known for his debut novel Sister Carrie, his second novel Jennie Gerhardt, published in 1911, is superior in almost every way. It’s surprising how similar these two consecutive novels are in terms of subject matter. Both feature a female protagonist born of a lower class who attracts a man from a higher station in life. Both women are thus elevated above their humble breeding into a higher social sphere, but never quite find comfort or safety in their new situation. In the eleven years between the two novels, it appears that Dreiser learned a lot about women. Jennie is a much more complex, realistic, and likeable character than Carrie Meeber. The male leads in each novel are quite similar also—men with established and prestigious positions in the business world who endanger their reputations by taking up with a woman socially beneath them. The one area where Sister Carrie surpasses Jennie Gerhardt is in its depiction of the social and economic conditions of its time, particularly in its scenes of labor unrest. Jennie Gerhardt does explore poverty to some extent, but mostly its an examination of the constricting social conventions and hypocritical moral righteousness rampant in the stratified social structure of the era. It was a time when one instance of premarital sex would brand a woman as a harlot, and anyone who strove to mingle with those financially above them would be firmly reminded of their proper place. Dreiser takes a feminist stance in pointing out the absurdity of such restrictions. Given such a rigid moral code, it’s a wonder how anyone ever got together to make babies.

The most compelling quality of Dreiser’s novel is its authenticity. Jennie is an exceptional girl, by some real-world standards, but she’s no idealized heroine. She makes some stupid mistakes in this book, but they’re real-life mistakes, the kind that you or I or the people we know make every day. Dreiser finds drama in the choices and tribulations of common people and elevates their everyday lives to the level of Greek tragedy. Stylistically, his prose is very much in the vein of Emile Zola’s naturalism. His descriptive passages are marked by an unflinching, almost microscopic realism, yet he goes off into eloquent philosophical asides that ponder the very nature of humanity itself. He’s kinder and gentler than Zola, though. Nothing feels forced or overwrought. I kept expecting that the next turn of the page would bring some monumental tragedy, but it never came. Dreiser shows us realistic people dealing with real-world troubles, yet it’s never dull, sappy, or melodramatic. Though not without its flaws, this novel is an exemplary work of American realism and a compelling read for anyone who enjoys the classic literature of the early 20th century.
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Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian by Ivan Turgenev, et al.

Weak selections from superstar authors

Ivan Turgenev

This collection of Russian short fiction is part of a ten-volume series published in 1898 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, entitled Stories by Foreign Authors. Though the other books in the series offer a mix of famous and lesser-known writers, this volume features nothing but superstars. Despite the fame and glory achieved by these illustrious authors, the selections included here are not their best work, and the collection as a whole is a major disappointment.

Russian literature rose to prominence among world readers during the transition from romanticism to realism. Russian writers, along with those of France, led the vanguard in breaking away from the conventions of the past and defining the new realist style. In Ivan Turgenev’s “Mumu,” a wealthy old woman presides over a house full of servants in Moscow. Among them is a frighteningly gigantic laborer who is both deaf and dumb. After being spurned by a woman, this gentle giant develops a loving attachment to a puppy. In “The Shot,” by Alexander Pushkin, the narrator, an army officer, forms a friendship with a retired soldier. He later questions his judgment of character, however, when his new friend displays indications of cowardice. Both of these are adequately good stories, but they both give an inkling of what’s wrong with Russian realism. Turgenev and Pushkin seem to go out of their way to bore the reader, as if providing any degree of entertainment or satisfaction would be pandering to romantic conventions. Tugenev’s story is a little too cutesy at times, with characters that are often little more than cartoon caricatures. Pushkin’s narrative leads toward two possible outcomes, but in the end he opts for a third option that’s neither interesting nor gratifying but merely fizzles to a halt.

Nikolai Gogol’s story “St. John’s Eve” is a horse of a different color entirely. It’s yet another man-sells-his-soul-to-the-devil story, this time about a servant who wants to marry his rich master’s daughter. That’s my best guess anyway, because it’s really an unintelligible mess. It delivers loads of spooky Halloween imagery expressed in interminable run-on sentences. It opens with a bizarre and pointless intro that makes even the identity of the narrator unclear. It’s hard to say who’s to blame for this epic failure, the author or the translator, so I blame them both.

Not even the greatest Russian writer of all time, Leo Tolstoy, can save this collection. The book closes with a selection that poorly represents this great master, “An Old Acquaintance.” This story is set in an army camp in the Caucasus. What war they’re fighting isn’t important, since the narrative doesn’t concern itself with combat, but revolves around the relationships within the Russian ranks. A former gentleman of the higher class who has fallen on hard times volunteers for military service in hopes of improving his station in life. The officers don’t respect him because he’s poor, and he looks down on the common soldiers because they’re uncultured. 19th-century Russians may have found these class issues fascinating, but for everyone else the story is just a bore. None of the characters, of any rank or class, inspire any interest or sympathy.

Out of all ten volumes of the Stories by Foreign Authors series, this book is clearly the worst. Although intended to showcase the best that Russian literature had to offer in the late 19th century, it only showcases poor editorial choices and weak translations. If you’re looking for an introduction to classic Russian literature, you’d be better off searching elsewhere.

Stories in this collection

Mumu by Ivan Turgenev 

The Shot by Alexander Pushkin 

St. John’s Eve by Nikolai Gogol 

An Old Acquaintance by Leo Tolstoy 

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Salute to University Presses

November 9-15, 2014 is University Press Week

In honor of this occasion, Old Books by Dead Guys pays tribute to these unsung heroes of the publishing world. What is a university press, you ask? As the name indicates, they are usually affiliated with a university or some other scholarly organization, research institute, or think tank. Most are non-profit entities, but they have nothing against selling books and making money. They come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny skeleton-crew outfits to gargantuan behemoths (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge). They differ primarily from commercial publishers in that their mission is to publish works of scholarly import, whether profitable or not. Many books published by university presses are aimed at an academic audience, with the main purpose of advancing the body of knowledge in a particular field of study. 

Prior to the invention of the ebook and the subsequent easy access to free public domain literature, university presses were one of the few places one could turn to for obscure old books by dead guys. They are still the source of most books on literary criticism and biography, as well as many works of foreign literature in translation. Here at OBDG we’re mainly concerned with the humanities—literature, history, philosophy—but of course there are many UPs that focus on the sciences as well.

All I can offer in humble homage to these valuable institutions is to spread the word on some university press editions that have graced the pages of this blog. Looking over the list of titles below, you’ll see that many of these books are so narrow in scope and appeal that they’re unlikely to take the world by storm, yet for those interested in these particular subject areas these are valuable volumes that, were it not for the scholarly mission of university presses, would likely have gone unpublished. Thank you, university presses, for publishing the little books that matter! 

Click on the titles below to read the full reviews:

University of Georgia Press

• Jack London, Photographer by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, et al. (2010)

University of Illinois Press

• Frank Norris: A Life by Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler (2006)
• The American Discovery of Europe by Jack D. Forbes (2007)

University Press of Kansas

• Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Radical Press by Elliott Shore (1988)
• Birger Sandzén: An Illustrated Biography by Emory Lindquist (1993)

University of Nebraska Press (and their Bison Books imprint)

• Swords from the Desert by Harold Lamb (2009)
• Swords from the West by Harold Lamb (2009)
• Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual by Lauren Coodley (2013)

Oxford University Press

• Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life by A. A. Long (2004)
• Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World by Lynn V. Foster (2005)
• The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate by Tad Brennan (2005)
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine (2008)

Princeton University Press

• The Life of a Painter by Gino Severini (1995)

Smithsonian Institution Press

• Juan Rulfo’s Mexico. Photographs by Juan Rulfo. Text by Carlos Fuentes, et al. (2002)

University of Texas Press

• José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography by José Clemente Orozco (1962)
• Leopoldo Mendéz: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print by Deborah Caplow (2007)

Utah State University Press

• Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Edited by Richard W. Etulain (1979)

University of Washington Press

• Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast by Hilary Stewart (1979)

Yale University Press

• Beginning Chinese Reader, Parts I and II by John DeFrancis (1966)
• Intermediate Chinese Reader, Parts I and II by John DeFrancis (1967)
• Advanced Chinese Reader by John DeFrancis (1968)

Jack London Reports: War Correspondence, Sports Articles, and Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard

Disappointing war stories, exceptional sports journalism
Jack London is one of America’s greatest fiction writers, but throughout his career he was quite a prolific author of nonfiction as well. Jack London Reports, published in 1970, is a collection of his journalism. The book contains 65 articles, divided into three categories: war correspondence, sports articles, and miscellaneous writings.

You would think that war correspondence would be something that London would excel at, but this section of the book is really an ordeal to get through. In 1904, London traveled to Korea to cover the Japanese-Russian War, but the Japanese military would not allow him to get anywhere near the actual combat, and his attempts to sneak off to the front lines were thwarted. London still managed to write 22 articles complaining about how he wasn’t being allowed access to the war, and his disappointment and disgust are palpable. The result is a series of boring stories about horses and dreary accounts of travel over muddy roads. Despite his animosity for the Japanese, London expresses admiration for their military precision, but he unsympathetically portrays the Koreans as if they were all dumb country bumpkins.

His attitude toward the Mexicans isn’t much better. His coverage of the American occupation of Veracruz in 1914 makes it clear that he views our southern neighbors as a nation of children who need a white savior to come and clean up their third-world mess. Even so, his writing on the Mexican Revolution is definitely better than his work from Korea. In his excellent essay “The Trouble Makers of Mexico,” he demonstrates a keen understanding of the complex web of Mexican politics. Still, though I have a personal interest in Mexican history, London still managed to bore me with most of these articles.

His sports writing, on the other hand, far exceeded my expectations, and I am by no means a sports fan. London wrote ten articles on the Schützenfest, a shooting competition that took place in San Francisco in 1901. There are also fifteen articles about boxing, culminating in the 1910 “Fight of the Century” between James Jeffries and Jack Johnson. I couldn’t care less about either one of these sports, but London’s writing is truly enthralling. He thoroughly examines the mechanics of each sport, its history and customs, and finds ingenious ways to connect modern athletic competition with the evolutionary survival of the fittest. These pieces are truly a cut above typical sports reportage.

The final section of the book includes 11 articles on miscellaneous subjects. About half of these can be found in other collections; the rest are rarities only found here, though they cover familiar ground. Standouts include “The Story of an Eye-Witness,” London’s account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; “The Road,” a sociological study of tramp culture; and “Our Guiltless Scapegoats: The Stricken of Molokai,” about the Hawaiian leper colony.

This book begs comparison with The Apprenticeship Writings of Frank Norris, a two-volume collection of journalism by the author of The Octopus and McTeague, who started out as a staff writer for the San Francisco Wave. In most cases, Norris is the better journalist, able to draw interesting, poetic prose from even the most mundane subject matter, but London is by far the superior sports writer. His boxing analyses beat the heck out of Norris’s dull football stories any day. Overall, the articles contained in Jack London Reports are hit and miss. Only the most curious of London aficionados, or avid boxing enthusiasts, should delve into this book.

Articles in this collection:

The Japanese-Russian War (22 articles)

The Mexican Conflict (7 articles)

Sports Articles (25 articles)

Miscellaneous Writings (11 articles, listed below):

The Home-Coming of the Oregon

The Road

Housekeeping in the Klondike

The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction

The Yellow Peril

The Story of an Eye-Witness

If Japan Wakens China

Navigating Four Horses North of the Bay

Our Guiltless Scapegoats: The Stricken of Molokai

My Hawaiian Aloha

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The Promise by Pearl S. Buck

The sequel to Dragon Seed
The Promise, a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck, was originally published in 1943. It is a sequel to Buck’s 1942 novel Dragon Seed, but the publisher of the ebook edition gives no indication of this whatsoever. Only after I began reading the book did I realize, “Hey, I already know all these characters.” It’s important to note because if you haven’t already read Dragon Seed you’ll be lost in chapter one. Dragon Seed described the 1939 Japanese invasion of eastern China, as told through the eyes of Ling Tan and his family, who live in a village outside Nanking. The Promise opens in 1941. The family is still living under Japanese occupation. One son, Lao San, who goes by the name of Sheng in this novel, has left home and is battling the invaders as a freedom fighter.

The Promise referred to in the title is explained in chapter one. The people of Mei and Ying promised to come to the aid of China if they were ever attacked. Now the Chinese people are waiting and hoping that these two great nations will live up to that promise. Mei is America and Ying is England. Sheng leads a military expedition into British-occupied Burma to help the Brits repel the Japanese invasion there. While in Burma, the Chinese forces are commanded by an American, who may or may not be based on a real historical figure. As she typically does, Buck writes this historical novel with almost no specific proper nouns. For example, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese military, and his wife are referred to simply as the Ones Above. Nevertheless, despite the deliberate obscurity, the reader does get an education into this lesser-known campaign of World War II. Told from a Chinese perspective, the story depicts the Americans and Brits as well-intentioned imperialists whose racist attitude toward their Asian subjects leads to the needless loss of human lives.

Stylistically, Buck’s writing is like a cross between the socially conscious realism of the early 20th century, like The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle, and the romantic television miniseries of the 1970s, like The Thorn Birds or Rich Man, Poor Man. Her novels are intelligent, moving, and skillfully crafted, with just a hint of sweet, sticky sap flowing beneath the surface. Still, those with a tolerance for romanticism will not only not mind this aspect of Buck’s work but will in fact come to enjoy it. This sequel is actually superior to its predecessor. Dragon Seed was marked by an uncomfortable inconsistency. The first half of the book consisted of brutally realistic depictions of war crimes, while the second half was all rosy optimism. The Promise proceeds on a much more even keel, rarely resorting to either extreme, and the book is better for it. Though it lacks the shocking, indelible scenes of atrocity that punctuate Dragon Seed, The Promise is a thoroughly engaging saga that convincingly conveys the stirring urgency of the life and death struggles of wartime. The final chapter is a bit weak, but not enough to discount the strength of the book as a whole.

Buck is best-known, of course, for her House of Earth trilogy, consisting of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided. Could Dragon Seed and The Promise be the beginning and middle volumes of another trilogy? Though I’ve found no evidence to support this theory, given the ending of this book and the title of her next novel, China Flight, I suspect this is the case. After the experience I had reading this book, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Ling Tan and his family show up unannounced in another of Buck’s books.
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Temple Trouble by H. Beam Piper

Get me to the church on (para)time
Paratime Police officer Verken Vall is at it again. H. Beam Piper’s science fiction novella Temple Trouble was originally published in the April 1951 issue of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In this fourth installment of the Paratime series, Vall is once again tasked with maintaining order and keeping the peace in one of the myriad alternate timelines that exist in a different space-time reality than our own. On many of these parallel timelines, in the Fourth Level Proto-Aryan Sector, there exists a pre-mechanical civilization that worships a six-armed god named Yat-Zar. The same bureaucracy that governs the Paratime Police has co-opted this god for their own ends and installed their transtemporal agents as priests within his temples. They use this religious subterfuge to conceal the fact that they are mining these worlds’ uranium and transporting it back to their own timeline. In Piper’s Paratime universe, there are all sorts of rules and regulations that restrict transtemporal travelers from messing with other timelines, but apparently raping other civilizations of their resources is OK as long as one can go about it undetected. On one particular timeline, however, a political coup has overthrown the existing king in favor of a new ruler, who establishes a new god, Muz-Azin, in place of the convenient Yat-Zar. Some of the priests/miners are captured and sentenced to brutal torture and human sacrifice. It’s up to Vall and his team to rescue these prisoners before the bloodshed starts.

If that sounds confusing as all get out, I assure you Piper’s telling is even more bewildering. The first half of Temple Trouble is basically a disorienting mess of proper nouns which, typical of ‘50s sci-fi, are composed primarily of X’s, K’s, and V’s. It’s difficult if not impossible to keep track of who exactly belongs to which religious sect or political faction. In Piper’s works, overwhelming the reader is intentional; he draws you into his complex world by subjecting you to full immersion. Thankfully, the second half of the book is basically a rescue operation, and an entertaining one at that. As usual, Piper combines familiar action-movie gunplay with mind-bending futuristic gadgets. The fictional universe of Paratime is a brilliant construction, and Piper exploits his creation’s possibilities to the fullest. He never settles for the most simple or convenient solution to a story, but always opts for a complicated plot with political intricacy and philosophical depth.

If you’ve never read H. Beam Piper, this is not the way to introduce yourself to his work. You’d be better off starting with the earlier and more user-friendly novella Police Operation. Those who already enjoy Piper’s writing and are familiar with his Paratime universe will have to admit that this is not the best installment in the series, but it does deliver enough of its author’s visionary imagination and wry sense of humor to satisfy ardent fans. Verken Vall has had more interesting and exciting adventures than this, but a ride-along with him on Paratime patrol is never a waste of time.
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