Les Rougon-Macquart is the collective title given to a cycle of twenty novels by French writer Émile Zola. Subtitled Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire, it follows the lives of the members of the two titular branches of a fictional family living during the Second French Empire and is one of the most prominent works of the French naturalism literary movement.
The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. Not only the inaugural novel, it is the series' founding text, establishing its genealogical basis. The family's greed and rapacity mirrors the diseased society in which it flourishes. This lively new translation is accompanied by introduction and notes.
Im going to celebrate the 21st century with a re-read of His Excellency Eugène Rougon. Swiftly Tilting Planet
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. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. "
Inspired by real events and meticulously researched by Zola, Money is, in the wake of recent financial scandals, an all-too-topical exploration of the dynamics of greed, the excesses of capitalism and its dangerous relationship with politics and the press.
In The Dream, the sixteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola blends mysticism and fairy tale with naturalism as an orphan girl falls in love with a nobleman.
An ambitious and unscrupulous priest arrives in the provincial town of Plassans, intent on conquering its political and social life. His arrival has profound consequences for the Mouret family, whose lives are turned upside down. This is the fourth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and the first modern translation for more than fifty years.
Pot Luck , Zola's most acerbic satire, describes daily life in a newly constructed block of flats in late nineteenth-century Paris. In examining the contradictions that pervade bourgeois life, Zola reveals a multitude of betrayals and depicts a veritable 'melting pot' of moral and sexualdegeneracy. This new translation captures the robustness of Zola's language and restores the omissions of earlier abridged versions.
Eleventh book in the author's Rougon-Macquart cycle.
The Sin of Abbé Mouret is the fifth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It follows Serge Mouret, a young priest, aspiring to perfect purity and sanctity. An illness leaves him with amnesia, and no longer knowing he is a priest, he falls in love with his nurse. Together they roam an Eden-like garden called the 'Paradou'.
A fascinating study in sexual psychology and sexual politics, the novel focuses on Helene Grandjean, a widow, and her shifting emotional states. This is the eighth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and the first modern translation for more than fifty years.
Florent Quenu returns to Paris after being unjustly imprisoned and finds the city utterly changed. The great new food market, Les Halles, has been built, and food dominates the political and social life of the capital. The third in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, The Belly of Paris appears in a vibrant new translation.
When Pauline Quenu is taken to the seaside to live with her relatives, her love of life contrasts with the pessimism which infects the family. This is the twelfth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, remarkable for it's depictions of intense emotions and physical and mental suffering.
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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 Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.
One of Zola's most violent works, this novel is on one level a tale of murder and possession, and on another a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. It evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, and a society hurtling towards the future.
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Prompted by his theories of heredity and environment, Zola set out to show Nana, "the golden fly," rising out of the underworld to feed on society—a predetermined product of her origins. Nana's latent destructiveness is mirrored in the Empire's, and they reflect each others' disintegration and final collapse in 1890. Built around the book's scientific skeleton is a powerful, sensual atmosphere, and a rich use of words which elevate the novel beyond the realistic platform into a "poem of male desires."
Zola's novel of peasant life describes the disintegration of the Fouan family when Papa Fouan decides to divide his land between his three children. Greed and violence feed a bitter struggle for supremacy. This new translation captures the novel's blend of brutality and lyricism in its evocation of the inexorable cycle of the natural world.
Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur, who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate.
Doctor Pascal is the twentieth and final novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart series. Pascal Rougon has spent his life chronicling the hereditary patterns and illnesses of his family, using medicine to attempt cures, whilst his niece Clotilde places her faith in God.