100 stories dating from 1908 to 1945.

Edited and with an introduction by Robert PhelpsThe hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as 'Bella-Vista', 'The Tender Shoot' and 'Le K-pi', Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening. Shot through with the colours and flavours of the Parisian world and fertile French countryside, these short stories reverberate with the fine-spun desire, wit and psychological acuity that made Colette unique.

The women in the linked short story collection Once Removed carry the burdens imposed in the name of intimacy--the secrets kept, the lies told, the disputes initiated--as well as the joy that can still manage to triumph. A singer with a damaged voice and an assumed identity befriends a silent, troubled child; an infertile law professor covets a tenant's daughterly affection; a new mother tries to shield her infant from her estranged mother's surprise Easter visit; an aging shopkeeper hides her husband's decline and a decades-old lie to keep her best friends from moving away. With depth and an acute sense of the fragility of intimate connection, Colette Sartor creates stories of women that resonate with emotional complexity. Some of these women possess the fierce natures and long, vengeful memories of expert grudge holders. Others avoid conflict at every turn, or so they tell themselves. For all of them, grief lies at the core of love.

Colette can't find something to talk about with the new kids in the neighborhood...so she invents a pet! Her fib quickly escalates, and suddenly her parakeet is a larger-than-life world-traveler named Marie Antoinette. Have her new friends figured out her secret? What will they do? This charming story both clearly identifies the struggle of navigating a different experience, and demonstrates to kids a lovely and welcoming way to treat someone new in their community.

A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation. Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy--a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy's sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon's. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she flirted with the Nazi occupiers of Paris, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. And all the while, this incomparable woman poured forth a torrent of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day. Judith Thurman, author of the National Book Award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen, portrays Colette as a thoroughly modern woman: frank in her desires, fierce in her passions, forever reinventing herself. Rich with delicious gossip and intimate revelations, shimmering with grace and intelligence, Secrets of the Flesh is one of the great biographies of our time. NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.

Movie "Colette" coming in September starring Keira Knightley! From her marriage at the age of 20, until her divorce, this snapshot of Colette's life focuses on her formative years. Incredibly complex, powerfully determined, truly gifted, Colette challenged herself to reinvent her life and assert herself as a free woman. In her day, her behavior scandalized and vexed the establishment. But in the end, she helped to free women in their thinking and became member and then president of France's prestigious Académie Goncourt, among many other honors as one of France's preeminent authors. For mature readers.