Part of Emile Zolayes'>#8217;s multigenerational RougonMacquart saga, The Belly of Paris is the story of Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devilyes'>#8217;s 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 his brotheryes'>#8217;s family in the newly rebuilt Les Halles market, Florent is soon caught up in a dangerous maelstrom of food and politics. Amid intrigue among the marketyes'>#8217;s sellersyes'>#8211;the fishmonger, the charcutiyes'>#232;re, the fruit girl, and the cheese vendoryes'>#8211;and the glorious culinary bounty of their labors, we see the dramatic difference between yes'>#8220;fat and thinyes'>#8221; (the rich and the poor) and how the widening gulf between them strains a city to the breaking point. Translated and with an Introduction by the celebrated historian and food writer Mark Kurlansky, The Belly of Paris offers fascinating perspectives on the French capital during the Second Empireyes'>#8211;and, of course, tantalizing descriptions of its sumptuous repasts.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful novelist, Claude's originality is mocked at the Salon and turns gradually into a doomed obsession with one great canvas. Life - in the form of his model and wife Christine and their deformed child Jacques - is sacrificed on the altar of Art.
The Masterpiece is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a unique insight into his career as a writer and his relationship with Cézanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemia world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despit the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.
Readership: Students of French literature, history, art, and culture.
The first translation into English since 1895 The Kill is the second volume in Zola's great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, and the first to establish Paris as the centre of Zola's narrative world Regarded as Zola's finest novel before L'Assommoir and one of the most important novels about nineteenth-century Paris and its rebuilding under Baron Haussmann Superb translation by Brian Nelson perfectly captures the energy of the original 'It was the time when the rush for spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.' The Kill (La Curée) 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 Renée, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime.
Readership: Readers of classic fiction, of Zola, students of French literature, nineteenth-century French studies, the novel, social history, urban history, representations of Paris, theories of modernity
The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the spectacular development 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 consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century.
Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified.
This new translation of the eleventh book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of Zola's greatest novels of the modern city.
