Emile Zola

Here is a true publishing eventthe first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fictions giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zolas The Kill (La Cure) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the authors twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a...

Part of Emile Zolas multigenerational Rougon-Macquart saga, The Belly of Paris is the story of Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devils Island. Returning to his native Paris, Florent finds a city he barely recognizes, with its working classes displaced to make way for broad boulevards and bourgeois flats. Living with...

Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan --eacute--;lite, was la Ville Lumi--egrave--;re, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-si--egrave--;cle moral corruption. The fate of Nana, the Helen of Troy of the Second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir,...

The Ladies' Paradise is a compelling story of ambition and love set against the backdrop of the spectacular rise of the department store in 1860s Paris. Now adapted for BBC Television and given a British setting in The Paradise, Zola's novel is a masterly portrayal of life in the bustling, gossipy world of the best department store in town....

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted `Germinal! Germinal!' The central figure, Etienne Lantier,...

The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Not only the inaugural novel, it is the series' founding text, establishing its genealogical basis. The family's greed and rapacity mirrors the diseased society in which it flourishes. This lively new translation is accompanied by introduction and notes....