Books, Literature & Fiction, Authors, A-Z, ( Z )

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Germinal (Everyman Paperback Classics)
by Tuttle Publishing (Paperback)

Written by Zola(1840-1902),the leading figure in the French school of Naturalistic fiction,GERMINAL (1885) is the compelling portrait of life in a mining community.The title of the novel refers back to a turbulent period of history,an era of violent change and expected renewal,and the novel itself is the thirteenth ofa twenty-volume series known as 'Rougon-Macquart'series after the names of rhe main branches,one legitimate,the othe illegitimate,of a single family.Gervaise Macquart,whose unhappy tale is told in L'ASSOMMOIR,is the mother of the hero in GERMINAL,Etienne.Etienne is a political figure as well as a compelling psychological study.Through him Zola examines the problems of industrial strife and traces the growing influence of socialism and anarchism.

Émile Zola
The Belly of Paris (Oxford World's Classics)
by Oxford University Press, USA (Paperback)

Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'etat in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the city changed beyond recognition. The old Marche des Innocents has been knocked down as part of Haussmann's grand program of urban reconstruction, replaced by Les Halles, the spectacular new food markets. Disgusted by a bourgeois society whose devotion to food is inseparable from its devotion to the Government, Florent attempts an insurrection. Les Halles, apocalyptic and destructive, play an active role in Zola's picture of a world in which food and the injustice of society are inextricably linked. This is the first English translation in fifty years of Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris). The third in Zola's great cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, it is as enthralling as Germinal, Therese Raquin, and the other novels in the series. Its focus on the great Paris food hall, Les Halles--combined with Zola's famous impressionist ...

Émile Zola
The Ladies' Paradise (Oxford World's Classics)
by Oxford University Press, USA (Paperback)

The Ladies Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the rise of the modern department store in late nineteenth-century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family: it is emblematic of changes in consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century. This new translation of the eleventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola's greatest works.

Emile Zola
Nana (French Edition)
by Presse Pocket (Mass Market Paperback)

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Theatre des Varietes. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Rich men, Comtes and Marquises fall at her feet, great ladies try to emulate her appearance, lovers even kill themselves for her. Nana's hedonistic appetite for luxury and decadent pleasures knows no bounds - until, eventually, it consumes her. "Nana" provoked outrage on its publication in 1880, with its heroine damned as 'the most crude and bestial sort of whore', yes the language of the novel makes Nana almost a mythical figure: a destructive force preying on a corrupt society.

Emile Zola
Therese Raquin
by Penguin (Non-Classics) (Paperback)

'Therese Raquin' is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere 'human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. 'Therese Raquin' stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock.

Émile Zola
L'Assommoir (Oxford World's Classics)
by Oxford University Press, USA (Paperback)

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. At the center of the story stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband soon squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, a local drinking spot, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor.. L'Assommoir was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. This new translation captures not only the brutality but the pathos of its characters' lives.

Emile Zola
The Kill (Modern Library)
by Modern Library (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2004-08-03)

Here is a true publishing event–the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction’s giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola’s The Kill (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author’s twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée’s financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and “the capital of the nineteenth century.” In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman’s spirit and a city’s soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world’s premier translators from the French, The Kill contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by ...

Emile Zola
The Masterpiece (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)
by University of Michigan Press (Paperback)

This controversial novel, set in the art world of Paris, has been read as an attack on the Impressionist painters who had been Zola's friends

Emile Zola
Money (Rougon-Macquart)
by Mondial (Paperback)

From the Rougon-Macquart Series: Money (L'Argent): After a disastrous speculation, Aristide Saccard was forced to sell his mansion and to cast about for means of creating a fresh fortune. Chance made him acquainted with Hamelin, an engineer whose residence in the East had suggested to him financial schemes which at once attracted the attention of Saccard. With a view to financing these schemes the Universal Bank was formed, and by force of advertising became immediately successful. Emboldened by success, Saccard launched into wild speculation... --- "Judged by the standard of popularity, 'Money' may be said to rank among M. Zola's notable achievements... This is not surprising, as the book deals with a subject of great interest to every civilized community. And with regard to this English version, it may, I think, be safely said that its publication is well timed, for the rottenness of our financial world has become such a crying scandal, and the inefficiency of our company laws ...

Émile Zola
Au Bonheur des Dames (Penguin Classics)
by Penguin Classics (Paperback)

Through charm, drive, and diligent effort Octave Mouret has become the director of one of the finest new department stores in Paris, Au Bonheur des Dames. Supremely aware of the power of his position, Mouret seeks to exploit the desire that his luxuriantly displayed merchandise arouses in the ladies who shop, and the aspirations of the young female assistants he employs. Charting the beginnings of the capitalist economy and bourgeois society, Zola captures in lavish detail the greedy customers and gossiping staff, and the obsession with image, fashion, and gratification that was a phenomenon of nineteenth-century French consumer society. Of all Zola's novels, this may be the one with the most relevance for our own time.

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