[close] Memoirs of an Egotist, Stendhal’s fragmentary autobiographical work, is alert, wry, and perpetually self–questioning. Through a series of apparently random impressions of the political, social, and artistic movements of the world around him, he imbues a range of human experience, from the mundane to the extraordinary, with the significance it deserves. Foreword by Doris Lessing.

Containing everything from delightful thumbnail sketches of his friends and colleagues, to lyrical remembrances of gardens and operas and tenderly amused descriptions of tea with London prostitutes, Memoirs of an Egotist is as startling as it is revealing. French writer Stendhal (1783–1842) is most famous for his two realist masterpieces, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. [close]