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You've probably read "The Necklace" at some point: in grade school, perhaps in a college literature class, or in a collection containing short stories from various authors. It's very good, and its mirror image, "The Jewels" (which I hadn't read previously) is also very good. I appreciate that "Ball of Fat" (Boule de Suif) is translated here as "Butterball", a slightly nicer word for the prostitute who appears within the story. Two "horror" stories here entitled "The Hand" and "The Entity" feel like Poe and were written at about the same time Poe was writing. This collection seems to try to give us 12 varied stories/themes to represent this author, but for me they were uneven in quality: "On the Water", for example, has an inexplicable, out of nowhere, final line that feels tacked on by the author as if he didn't know how to end the story, so he just wrote a final line at random. (Of course, this feeling could have been the way the translator saw the story.) I enjoyed this collection, and will read more of Maupassant's extensive amount of short stories.