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PARIS (dpa)- A collection of previously unpublished short stories by Marcel Proust is to hit French bookshops in October, publisher Editions De Fallois has announced.
The founder of the publishing house, Bernard de Fallois, who died last year, found the manuscripts while investigating other unpublished early works of Proust in the 1950s.
They had been originally intended for publication as part of Proust's first book, "Les Plaisirs et les Jours" (The Pleasures and the Days), a collection of texts and poems that appeared in 1896.
The hitherto unpublished stories are partly "behind a transparent veil of fiction, an 'intimate journal' of the writer," Editions de Fallois said.
They evoke a realization of homosexuality "in a purely tragic mode," and may have been left out of the 1896 book "because their daring could have shocked a social milieu dominated by a strong traditional morality," the publisher suggested.
Proust (1871-1922) is seen as a pivotal figure of 20th-century Western literature.
His masterwork, "A la recherche du temps perdu" (translated as "Remembrance of Things Past" and "In Search of Lost Time"), was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.
The new book will be entitled "Le Mysterieux Correpondant et autres nouvelles inedites" (The Mysterious Correspondent and other unpublished stories).
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