A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master Émile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This...

Set in the 1860s in northern France, Zola's masterpiece of naturalistic fiction portrays the hardships of a mining community in which backbreaking physical exertion is undertaken for starvation wages. Étienne Lantier, an unemployed m...

His Excellency Eugène Rougon is set in the world of high politics and low characters during the Second Empire. The main protagonist, Eugène Rougon, is an determined and ruthless politician surrounded by a coterie of ambitious and gr...

New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky's deft translation brings new life to Emile Zola's rich characters and stunning depiction of Les Halles, the food markets of 1850s ParisThe Belly of Paris is the dramatic story of Flore...

Is it wrong to love whatever is beautiful and rich? I love it precisely because it is beautiful, because it is rich - because, I think, it brings joy to my heart. . .On Christmas day, in the flurry of a snow storm, the Huberts discove...

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognised artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling pain...