"A tale of gothic glamour, depicting European culture at its most corrupt, like Edgar Allan Poe with lashings of lust and facepaint" -Kate Pullinger At a fashionable party in Paris, an appalled young lady hears the story of the mysterious figure that haunts the elegant de Lanty household... Parisian artist Sarrasine travels to Italy to pursue his vocation of sculpture. At the opera, he falls in love with the beautiful prima donna, Zambinella. Entirely captivated by her beauty and her charms, he sets to sculpting a tribute to her perfect femininity while also attempting to court her. However, all is not as it seems, and on making a shocking discovery, Sarrasine's love suddenly turns to murderous rage. A vivid evocation of nineteenth-century Europe, Balzac's tragic tale of mistaken identity was the text used by Roland Barthes in his influential work of structuralist theory, S/Z. It is accompanied here by another of Balzac's short stories, the orientalist fable A Passion in the Desert.

Journalist and writer Honoré de Balzac is one of France's greatest nineteenth-century novelists and one of the founding fathers of realism in literature. He is the author of the immense series of ninety-one interconnected novels known as La Comédie humaine, which took its inspiration from Dante's Divine Comedy. This vast collection has had immense influence on later fiction and is a key work in the history of European literature.