Nature Stories

Jules Renard’s Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of? the great French Postimpressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humor in a series of miniature portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato. Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard’s sketches are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. Renard’s animals not only feel but speak, and one species, the swallow, even writes Hebrew. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us, instilling us with the sense that everything that has a life and grows in the hand of nature is to be respected, and that every creature and being is as individual as it is interrelated. In Douglas Parmee’s inspired new translation, Renard’s wonderful evocations of the natural world come to life as never before in English.

Jules Renard (1864–1910) was a French author and a member of the Academie Goncourt, most famous for the works Poil de carotte (Carrot Top) and Histoires naturelles (Nature Stories). Among his other works are Le Plaisir de rompre (The Pleasure of Breaking) and Huit jours a la campagne (Eight Days in the Countryside). His Journal was published in the United States in 2008.

Douglas Parmee (1914–2008) was a lifetime fellow of Queens College, Cambridge. He translated works by Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, and Chamfort, among others, including the NYRB Classics titles The Child by Jules Valles and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French painter and printmaker, a founding member of Les Nabis.