Émile Zola

Living in the pleasure-loving society of Napoleon III's France is a beautiful, capricious, good-natured yet noxious prostitute named Nana. For her, rich men give up their fortunes and honor; poor men give up their mates and even their lives.

L'essentiel de La Bête humaine, c'est l'instinct de mort dans le personnage principal, la fêlure cérébrale de Jacques Lantier, mécanicien de locomotive. Jeune homme, il pressent si bien la manière dont l'instinct de mort se déguise sous tous les appétits, l'Idée de mort sous toutes les idées fixes, la grande hérédité sous la petite, qu'il se tient à l'écart : d'abord des femmes, mais aussi du vin, de l'argent, des ambitions qu'il pourrait...

Émile Zola was one of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement. In 1871 Zola began to write his most notable series of novels, the "Rougon-Macquart Novels", that relate the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire. As a strict naturalist, Zola was greatly concerned with science, especially the problems of evolution and heredity vs. environment. However,...

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence....

The Beast Within (1890) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. The seventeenth of twenty volumes of Zola's monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series is an epic story of family, politics, class, and history that traces the disparate paths of several French citizens raised by the same mother. Spanning the entirety of the French Second Empire, Zola provides a sweeping portrait of change that refuses to shy away from controversy and truth as it gets to...

One of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement, was Émile Zola (1840-1902). He was the most important example of the literary genre of naturalism, and an integral part of developing theatrical naturalism. "The Kill" is the second book in Zola's "Les Rougon-Macquart", a twenty-volume series about a fictional family during the Second French Empire. The Kill, a second...

Provincial girl in 19th-century Paris takes part in the battle of the first department store versus the small shopkeepers.