The Duel Conrad, Joseph

"Haven''t you heard of the duel going on ever since 1801?"
An exciting, swashbuckling thriller based on a true story about two of Napoleon''s soldiers.
Conrad''s brilliantly ironic tale about two officers in Napoleon''s Grand Army who, under a futile pretext, fought an on-going series of duels throughout the Napoleanic Wars. Over decades, on every occasion they chanced to meet, they fought. Both satiric and deeply sad, this masterful tale treats both the futility of war and the absurdity of false honor, war''s necessary accessory.
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature''s greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

From the Publisher:
An exciting, swashbuckling thriller based on a true story about two of Napoleon’s soldiers.

Conrad’s brilliantly ironic tale about two officers in Napoleon’s Grand Army who, under a futile pretext, fought an on-going series of duels throughout the Napoleanic Wars. Over decades, on every occasion they chanced to meet, they fought. Both satiric and deeply sad, this masterful tale treats both the futility of war and the absurdity of false honor, war’s necessary accessory.

Author Bio

Joseph Conrad

Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzenioski, son of Polish nationalists who died in exile for their political activities, was raised by relatives in various parts of Eastern Europe. He went to sea at 16, and spent 20 years at sea, working first on French merchant ships in the West Indies, then on English ships, where he learned the language and traveled to Latin America and Africa. He drew on these experiences for much of his fiction; in 1890 he was the commander of a ship that traveled up the Congo River, the inspiration for HEART OF DARKNESS. He began writing in 1892, on a voyage from England to Australia, and in 1895 he left the British merchant service to become a full-time writer. He settled in London and married an Englishwoman. Although English was not his native language, he is renowned for the subtlety and descriptiveness of his prose--despite the fact that he spoke the language all his life with a heavy accent. His model for the writing of fiction was Henry James, whom he addressed as "cher ma?tre." Conrad died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 67. His epitaph, taken from Spenser's THE FAERIE QUEENE, reads: "Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, /Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please."

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The Duel (Paperback)

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