Pleasures and Days

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Long before In Search of Lost Time, the young Marcel Proust published a single volume of stories, sketches, prose poems and verse. Pleasures and Days appeared in 1896, handsomely illustrated and prefaced by Anatole France, and it already holds the themes of his great novel: memory, jealousy, snobbery, desire, and the slow work of time on everything we love.

Here are The Death of Baldassare Silvande, a young man facing the end with his whole life in view; Violante, a girl lost to worldly society; the melancholy summer of Madame de Breyves, who falls for a man she barely knows; A Young Girl's Confession and The End of Jealousy; satirical portraits of the salons; poems on painters and musicians; and a sequence of short daydreams and regrets written in prose of remarkable delicacy.

Often overlooked, this first book shows Proust finding his voice, and many of its pages foreshadow scenes and people that would return in the novel. This new translation presents the complete collection, with Anatole France's preface, and is a natural companion to In Search of Lost Time.