Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège Vendôme and the Sorbonne. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years. NYRB Classics publishes Balzac's The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Lily in the Valley, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, and The Unknown Masterpiece.

Jeanine Herman is a translator of French literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and art criticism. She has translated works by Julien Gracq, Pierre Clastres, Jean Genet, Francis Ponge, Julia Kristeva, among others. Her translation of Julien Gracq's Reading Writing was a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She is a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters.