Customer Reviews (1)

The runaway train on a one-way trip to nowhere
One of Zola's best and most famous works. There is something strangely fascinating about a murder where the killer escapes detection and punishment only to receive terminal treatment from another, totallyunexpected source. When this happens twice in the same book, along withsome tales of child abuse, a high-level cover-up, a sabotage attempt on atrain in which virtually everyone is killed in the carnage except thepersons targeted, a suicide, plus some assorted couplings outside of themarshalling yards, things get really interesting. What makes people commitsuch crimes? Here Zola really shows his skill in explaining his characters'motives and the dark, primeval forces that drive them. A pulsating,chilling story from beginning to end, full of unexpected twists, startingwith the creation of a previously unknown member of the Macquart family asthe novel's main character. Highly recommended for long train or airjourneys. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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"For a Night of Love" ("Pour une nuit d'amour"; published in 1883); one of the most controversial novellas of its time: "The narrative begins with a carefully accentuated picture of a serene life: that of a timid lad sequestered in a country town; this serenity is but the prelude to events ofthe most appalling tragedy-a tragedy which does not merely strike or wound, but positively annihilates... It is not needful to do more than say that it is one of the most repulsive productions ever published by its author, and a vivid exception to the general innocuous character of his short stories." (Edmund Gosse, 1892) --- "...the poetic suggestion lurking in the tale 'Pour une nuit d'amour,' which Poe might almost have written, can only be traced with difficulty, for it is wrapped in a ghastly realism." (Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, 1904) --- "It is interesting to notice from a note presumably furnished by Zola himself that the source of the plot of the psychopathic novel 'For A Night of Love' is in Casanova." (Alison M. Lederer, 1911) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great story--Archaic translation
This translation is not new; it's a copy of an early 20th century translation that is archaic and not a translation at all so much as a transliteration. Just "Look Inside" at the first page of text: the awkward syntax and poor grammar that only a crude translation could render. Zola was the ultimate stylist and if you think this poor version is what he intended, you don't know French lit very well. This publisher is not what it purports to be.

Three stories on the power of Love
Emile Zola is primarily known for his novels. Only one English language collection of Zola's short stories has been available prior to the publication of FOR A NIGHT OF LOVE. Ths is a set of 16 stories published by Oxford University Press under the title The Attack On The Mill And Other Stories.

This current collection brings together three stories that the editors claim have never before been published in English. All three have a romantic theme.

The first, For A Night Of Love, tells the story of a shy young postal worker who falls in love with his beautiful, rich, and haughty neighbor. She ignores him until one night when she needs his help. The story tells how far he will go for a night of love.

The second tale is of a young man, Nantas, who comes to Paris to make his fortune and falls in love with his landlord's daughter. She needs a favor from him, but disdains his love. He goes to extraordinary lengths to win her love, but will he succeed?

These two stories of male desire are followed by Fasting, a story in which Zola takes one of his pokes at the Catholic clergy. It portrays a rich woman's sexual daydreams as she sits in church listening to a sermon on fasting given by a gourmet priest .

All three stories are excellent at portraying 19th Century France and the people of this time. It is our good fortune that these three are now available in the English language. The Foreward gives some insight into Zola's writings and the Introduction some background on the stories. A good collection of stories from one of France's greatest writiers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Plus ca change plus ce le meme
If you ever needed proof of the cyclical nature of human existence read this. Here we are in 2008 with the dot com boom, the Enron debacle and now the housing bubble/credit crunch in the rear view mirror.

Rewind to Paris in the 1860s and you will find the exact same stuff going on with the same clamor to rein in irresponsible speculation that is causing cycles of boom and bust with attendant instability and misery.

As another reviewer has commented, Zola has a gift for analysis and revelation of the true complexity of the human being. Saccard, the main character is a thoroughly unscrupulous financial genius, hungry for money and the status which it affords him. He is the pied piper who merrily leads investors, large and small, over the precipice. The book deals with the hatred and envy of native French catholics for the Jewish oligarchy which rules the financial sector. Interestingly, the projects into which shareholder money is invested relate to the revitalization of the Near East, a capitalist crusade if you will, even including the dream of establishing the papacy in Jerusalem. It all sounds rather familiar in the wake of George W's recent crusade to democratize the Gulf starting with Iraq.

Initially I found the book fascinating simply for the parallels with modern shenanigans but I started to enjoy it more and more for the insightful depiction of human nature and the complex morality of "civilized" life. Zola was primarily a journalist and this novel is something of a drama documentary but a definite shoo-in for an Oscar.

One of my definite favorites
This is by far one of the best books I've ever read. Zola's ability to demonstrate the dark side in human beings is absolutely spectacular. If you are too read one of his works, it should be this one. ... Read more

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The third novel in Zola's twenty-volume series entitled "Les Rougon-Macquart," this story revolves around and within the 21-acre market Les Halles Centrales of Paris. The starving scholar Florent has escaped his unwarranted exile on Devil's Island, and he is alternately entranced and disgusted by his refuge in 'the belly of Paris.' Zola describes the market and Florent's experiences in the midst of it with his characteristically captivating comprehension, foreshadowing the total mastery of working-class speech in his later works. Florent makes a friend of Claude Lantier, a painter who explains the battle being waged in the vast Central Markets between the 'fat' burghers and 'thin' lower class, in which Florent is soon embroiled. He is a man caught between the fat and the thin, and this lack of allegiance leads to painful condemnation and Florent's ultimate disintegration. Presented here is the somewhat expurgated 1895 translation of Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, entitled "The Fat and the Thin". ... Read more

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ReadHowYouWant publishes a wide variety of best selling books in Large and Super Large fonts in partnership with leading publishers. EasyRead books are available in 11pt and 13pt. type. EasyRead Large books are available in 16pt, 16pt Bold, and 18pt Bold type. EasyRead Super Large books are available in 20pt. Bold and 24pt. Bold Type. You choose the format that is right for you.

This is Volume Volume 2 of 3-Volume Set.To purchase the complete set, you will need to order the other volumes separately: to find them, search for the following ISBNs: 9781427003621, 9781427004628

"Nana" is a realistic novel written in spontaneous style. As the story begins we meet the protagonist Nana, a prostitute. The novel focusses on the behaviour of the wealthy and elite of Paris at a time when France was world renowned as the centre of adult entertainment. Zola has successfully captured the corruption of the high-class French in the mid-1800s. Engrossing!

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Claude passait devant l'H?tel de ville, et deux heures du matin sonnaient ? l'horloge, quand l'orage ?clata. Il s'?tait oubli? ? r?der dans les Halles, par cette nuit br?lante de juillet, en artiste fl?neur, amoureux du Paris nocturne: Brusquement, les gouttes tomb?rent si larges, si drues, qu'il prit sa course, galopa d?gingand?, ?perdu, le long du quai de la Gr?ve. Mais, au pont Louis-Philippe, une col?re de son essoufflement l'arr?ta: il trouvait imb?cile cette peur de l'eau; et, dans les t?n?bres ?paisses, sous le cinglement de l'averse qui noyait les becs de gaz, il traversa lentement le pont, les mains ballantes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Vôtre pardon por cette critique en anglais!
I read French easily enough, but I'm scared to death of writing in it!

I had the pleasure of reading L'Oeuvre in French, but my wife read it in atranslation, which I have also reviewed.

The English title - The Masterpiece - isn't entirely adequate. The original - L'Oeuvre - could refer to a single painting or just as well to the Works of a painter, or to the Vocation/Work of being an artist. There are two characters in this novel who are consumed by their Work, the writer Pierre Sandoz and the painter Claude Lantier. The narrative focuses on the painter, Claude, whose genius is recognized only by his few closest friends, whose paintings are rejected and ridiculed by the public, and who in fact is pathologically unable to finish work, to express that genius to his own satisfaction. Claude's "Work" is a tragic failure in the end. But beyond the story of poor Claude, this novel is a profound depiction of the Artist -- any artist on any art -- and his/her agonistic consummation in The Work. Reading this novel with empathy will offer you two life-choices: 1) to be double-darn grateful NOT to be an artist, or 2) to be unable to imagine that Life is worth living if you are NOT an artist.

It's a wordy book, but artists are wordy people. There are chapter-long conversations that do not advance the plot, but rather serve as manifestos of Zola's literary aspirations, and of the aesthetics of the Impressionist painters who were his contemporaries. If those Impressionists are among your own artistic favorites, you will be thrilled by Zola's animation of them. If not, you may be bored. Me, I find that there are more boring readers in the world than boring books. One of those conversations, outdoors, between Claude and Pierre, amounts to Zola's 'prospectus' for his life work, the twenty novels of the "Rougon-Macquart" series. Pierre says:
"I know now exactly what I'm going to do in all this. Oh, nothing colossal, something quite modest, just enough for one lifetime even when you have some pretty exaggerated ambitions! I'm going to take a family and study each member of it, one by one, where they come from, what becomes of them, how they react to one another. Humanity in miniature, therefor, the way humanity evolves, the way it behaves... I shall place my characters in some definite period that will provide the milieu and the prevailing circumstances and make the thing a sort of slice of history... I shall make it a series of novels, say fifteen or twenty, each complete in itself and with its own particular setting, but all connected, a cycle of books...."
The character Pierre was just beginning his first novel, which would start him on a career of success, but foxy old Emile Zola was back-filling here. L'Oeuvre was the fourteenth of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, published in 1886. The twentieth -- Le Docteur Pascal -- would appear in 1893, four years before William Faulkner (America's great family-cycle novelist) was born.

Claude, Pierre, and their friends in the novel are "Bohemians" and The Masterpiece is a tangy, slangy, slightly lurid portrayal of the Bohemian lifestyle, that social and sexual freedom which lured artists and writers to the Paris of the mid-19th Century. Zola's books were shocking to his contemporaries, even in France but especially in Victorian England and America. Not only did he describe sexual relations explicitly but he removed them from questions of morality. Worse yet, he blatantly asserted the 'truth' of that horrid man Darwin! Zola was the first novelist of note to treat humanity as subject to evolutionary constraints, the first novelist of modern sociology. To my mind, Zola still seems a radically 'modern' writer.

That 'Bohemian' Paris, don't you know, is the Paris we all want to visit! The Paris we hope to see as tourists! That's another glory of Zola's Work; it's the closest we can come to a time machine. The descriptions of Paris -- of its streets, parks, crowds, passions in the 1800s -- are superbly evocative, even in the English translation. The hapless Claude, in the novel, is obsessed with the image of Paris that he aspires to paint on a canvas "as big as the Louvre". Claude's brief 'happiness', with his adoring wife and without the need to paint, takes place in the countryside, but Claude can't escape his obsession with Paris and its life of The Work. Eventually, Paris and L'Oeuvre consume him. His wife, for whom both the fictional author Pierre and the actual author Emile feel enormous affection and comprehension, falls victim to L'Oeuvre as tragically as Claude. Zola's portrayal of women in this novel and others, by the way, has been denounced by some as disparaging to women. I absolutely disagree. His women are flesh-and-blood real, complete in themselves, plausible, and every bit as admirable and/or despicable as his men.

I'd love to do an experiment in 'perception' with this novel, using two groups of readers. One group would read it "cold", with no prefaces or critiques telling them what to expect. The other group would be aware of the common critical assumptions that The Masterpiece is autobiographical and that Claude was intended as a partial portrayal of the painter Paul Cezanne. It's true that Zola and Cezanne were boyhood and lifetime friends, coming from the same city of southern France. It's very likely that Zola drew details of his novel from real-life experiences, including experiences borrowed from the life of Cezanne. And it seems to be true that Cezanne was somewhat offended by L'Oeuvre when he read it. But Claude Lantier is NOT Cezanne! And if Zola intended him to be Cezanne, he flagrantly misunderstood and misrepresented his friend. The paintings that Claude in the novel hopes to exhibit -- paintings of monstrous scope -- are nothing like Cezanne's. In fact, the one painting that Claude exhibits in the Gallery of the Rejected (an actual historical exhibit) is far closer to Manet than Cezanne, by its description. Cezanne's recognition was slow coming, but it came in full measure; Cezanne was NOT a frustrated failure, not at any time even in his own mind. The portrayal of Claude's self-destructive obsessive-compulsive personality could be taken as prophetic; the next generation of painters did include Vincent van Gogh, after all. In general, Zola understood writers and the aesthetic aspirations of writers far more clearly than he understood visual artists and their aesthetic preoccupations. That, I think, is the only weakness of this novel; Zola presumes to speak for painters too freely. One might also carp at Zola's depiction of the writer Pierre Sandoz; he "goes easy" on himself, if indeed Pierre is a self-portrait. Pierre is modest, brave, and above all loyal throughout. I can hardly believe Zola himself was so lovable.

One more 'pleasure' plucked from this English translation. Here's the description of the feast Pierre and his charming wife prepare, for the last uncomfortable reunion of their Bohemian circle of artist-friends:
"They were both fond of exotic dishes, and on this occasion decided on oxtail soup, grilled red mullet, fillet of beef with mushrooms, ravioli a l'italienne, hazel-hens from Russia and a truffle salad, as well as caviar and kilkis for hors d'oeuvre, a praline ice cream, a little Hungarian cheese green as an emerald, some fruit and pastries. To drink, simply some decanters of vintage claret, Chambertin with the roast and sparkling Moselle as a change from the same old champagne with the dessert."

A thousand devils, my friends! I was born in the wrong century! ... Read more

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Leader of the 19th-century naturalist movement in France, Zola's major works include Germinal and Nana, both part of the Rougon-Macquert Cycle.

This title, Emile Zola, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Emile Zola through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on Emile Zola, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

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The Kill (La Curee) is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris - the capital of modernity - as the centre of Zola's narrative world.Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable 'appetites' unleashed by the Second Empire (1852-70) and the transformation of the city by Baron Haussmann, the novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for money and lust for pleasure. The all-pervading promiscuity of the new Paris is reflected in the dissolute and frenetic lives of an unscrupulous property speculator, Saccard, his neurotic wife Renee, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime. ... Read more

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In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in the moral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almost simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true a perspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after the death of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethical force, as Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairly as posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge the heroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solution the elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still lived, in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the intelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as evident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive and retrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the literary periods to come. There will never be criticism to appreciate him more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly, than that of his immediate contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticism will be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be a question, and will have become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplished fact, something finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinary vitality of Zola, when he was doing the things most characteristic of him, forbids the notion of this in his case.


Download Emile Zola Now! ... Read more

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Originally published in 1887.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published by: Chatto & Windus in 1897 in 391 pages; Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; ... Read more

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Classic naturalist short story. According to Wikipedia: "Emile Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France...After his first major novel, Therese Raquin (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire... More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career re synthetized his work into La Comedie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution." ... Read more

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Originally published in 1901.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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On July 19th, 1898, Emile Zola arrived in England after fleeing imprisonment in France. He was to spend eleven months in self-imposed exile because of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. During this time, the family of his English translator, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, took care of his everyday needs. While in Britain, Zola wrote a short text entitled 'Pages d'exil,' in which he talked about his feelings regarding England, exile, and other matters. An avid photographer, Zola also took pictures of his surroundings that were left with the Vizetelly family when he returned to France.

Dorothy Speirs and Yannick Portebois, in collaboration with Ernest Alfred Vizetelly's last surviving grandson, have here reproduced those photographs with the first English translation, fully annotated, of 'Pages d'exil.' The photographs, of landscapes, churches, and street scenes, have never been published before, and represent a major contribution to the collection of Zola photographs, many of which are today largely inaccessible. Together, the text and photographs will be of great interest to anyone who enjoys Zola's work, and to scholars of French history and the Dreyfus Affair.

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; History / Europe / France; Literary Criticism / European / French; ... Read more