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(0)Émile Zola
1) L'Assommoir
Regarded by critics as one of the highest pinnacles of achievement in Emile Zola's literary career, L'Assommoir (best translated as "the cheap liquor store") offers an unflinching look at alcoholism among the working class in nineteenth-century France. Part of a larger, 20-volume story cycle that spanned Zola's entire career, L'Assommoir was the novel that initially propelled the writer to fame and fortune.
The story of a girl trapped in an unhappy marriage to her first cousin so captivated the French writer Emile Zola that he explored it in multiple works, producing both a novel and a play based on the same core set of characters. The protagonist, Camille, becomes desperate and takes matters into her own hands, committing what may be the perfect crime in order to build a new life for herself. Will she get away with it, or will her paralyzing guilt
...3) The Downfall
Dazzling romance, political intrigue, military conflict—this kind of top-rate historical fiction is a heady brew that French writer Emile Zola serves up better than anyone before or since. One of the novels in the author's celebrated Les Rougon-Macquart series, The Downfall follows the travails and triumphs of farmer and soldier Jean Macquart, who rises above adversity in a time of terrible discord to find a semblance of peace and
...Doctor Pascal concludes Zola's epic Rougon-Macquart series. Pascal has spent his thirty years as a physician cataloging his family and identifying their often unedifying exploits as the specific results of heredity and innateness. His niece at first believes this work to be an arrogant denial of God's omnipotence, but as Pascal reveals the details of the Rougon-Macquart family tree to her, she begins to see the value in his work.
