The best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism. --Merve Emre, The New Yorker

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs in an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. In this landmark new translation of Gustave Flaubert's masterwork, award-winning writer and translator Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of Flaubert's legendary prose style, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and scintillating novel.

This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. It includes a preface by Michele Roberts.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a novel about a poor young woman named Tess Durbeyfield whose father sends her to work for the rich Stoke-d'Urberville family, to whom he mistakenly believes they are related.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville rapes Tess. She returns home, where she gives birth to a child who soon dies. Tess becomes a milkmaid at the Talbothays Dairy, where she falls in love with Angel Clare, a young intellectual she met years before. On their wedding night, Angel learns about Tess's past and abandons her. Angel leaves for Brazil, then returns to find that Tess has killed Alec. Tess is arrested and hanged.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardcover Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert's influential bildungsroman

Gustave Flaubert conceived Sentimental Education, his final complete novel, as the history of his own generation, one that failed to fulfill the promise of the Revolution of 1848. Published a few months before the start of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, it offers both a sweeping panorama of French society over three decades and an intimate bildungsroman of a young man from a small town who arrives in Paris when protests against the monarchy are increasing.

The novel's protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, alternates between aimlessness and ambition as he searches for a meaningful life through love affairs and republican politics. Flaubert's narrative includes scenes of high drama, as scattered protests across Paris swell into revolution, and quiet moments of self-aware romanticism, crafting a story that possesses the sweep and scope of a historical novel combined with deep emotion and scandalous intimacy. Suffused with tragedy and the poignancy of lost chances and wasted lives, Sentimental Education is sharpened by satirical observations of what Flaubert condemned as the Second Empire's endemic hypocrisy and willful blindness.

This vibrant, new translation by Raymond N. MacKenzie includes an extensive critical introduction and annotations to help the modern reader appreciate Flaubert's achievement. Sentimental Education intertwines the personal, the intimate, and the subjective with the political, social, and cultural, embedding Frédéric's story in the larger arc of what Flaubert saw as France's decline into mediocrity and imbecility in its politics and manners.

Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions. Malcolm Bowie, a leading authority on French literature, explores Flaubert's genius in his masterly introduction to this must-have book for all lovers of great literature.

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.

Based on Flaubert's own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as the moral history of the men of my generation. It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning home to Normandy from Paris, notices Mme Arnoux, a slender, dark woman several years older than himself. It is the beginning of an infatuation that will last a lifetime. He befriends her husband, an influential businessman, and as their paths cross and re-cross over the years, Mme Arnoux remains the constant, unattainable love of Moreau's life. Blending love story, historical authenticity, and satire, Sentimental Education is one of the great French novels of the nineteenth century.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reproduces the distinguished Lafcadio Hearn translation, which translator Richard Sieburth calls a splendid period piece from one of America's premier translators of nineteenth-century French prose. In Lafcadio Hearn's Latinate rendering, Flaubert's experimental drama of the modern consciousness reads as weirdly as its oneiric original.

Gustave Flaubert once said of his heroine, Emma Bovary, c'est moi. In this acclaimed new translation, Adam Thorpe brings readers closer than ever before to Flaubert's peerless text and, by extension, the author himself.

Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma's adultery scandalized France when Madame Bovary was first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma's financial ruin remains just as compelling. Translator Adam Thorpe, an accomplished author in his own right, pays careful attention to the complex music of Flaubert's language, with its elegant, finely wrought sentences and closely observed detail. This exquisite Modern Library edition is sure to set a new standard for an enduring classic.

Praise for Adam Thorpe's translation of Madame Bovary

What leaves me reeling with each rereading (and Adam Thorpe's new translation is, pardon the pun, to die for) is the use of language. There can be no doubt as to the reason for Flaubert's brain popping at the top of the stairs when he was fifty-eight. He broke it scouring for perfect sentences, words, le mot juste.--Russell Kane, The Independent

Flaubert described his great work as a poem, so it is fitting that a poet and novelist of Thorpe's stature should turn his hand to it.--Robin Robertson, The Herald (Scotland)

Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgement. - Henry James

Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and downfall. A brilliant psychological portrait, Madame Bovary searingly depicts the human mind in search of transcendence. Who is Madame Bovary? Flaubert's answer to this question was superb: Madame Bovary, c'est moi. Acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1857, the work catapulted Flaubert to the ranks of the world's greatest novelists. This volume, with its fine translation by Lowell Bair, a perceptive introduction by Leo Bersani, and a complete supplement of essays and critical comments, is the indispensable Madame Bovary.

Includes The Trial of Madame Bovary

Translated by Mildred Marmur

With an Introduction by Robin Morgan and a New Afterword by Frederick Brown

In Flaubert's own words, the novel is a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile. At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.

In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius can compound, and the reader becomes genuinely fond of these two Don Quixotes of Ideas. This new translation also includes Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert's correspondence, Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert's letters, it is that the function of great art is not to provide 'answers.' The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions--personal, political, artistic--with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert's youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert's letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller's book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.

In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is a kind of encyclopedia made into farce, wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.

OEuvre classique de la littérature française du XIXe siècle, Madame Bovary de Gustave Flaubert suit Emma Bovary, la femme d'un médecin qui se lasse de son existence dans une petite ville et se tourne vers des liaisons adultères, des fantaisies romantiques et des dépenses extravagantes pour s'échapper. Son terrible sort et sa ruine financière sont le résultat de sa quête inébranlable de passion et d'ambitions irréalisables. Les limites de la société bourgeoise et les dangers des besoins non satisfaits sont mis en évidence par la prose minutieuse et la profonde perspicacité psychologique de Flaubert. L'ouvrage est salué pour son analyse critique du matérialisme et du romantisme ainsi que pour son ton réaliste.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience--together they confirm Flaubert as a master of the short story. A Simple Heart relates the story of Félicité, an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator, inspired by a stained-glass window in Rouen cathedral, describes the fate of a sadistic hunter destined to murder his own parents. The blend of faith and cruelty that dominates this story may also be found in Herodias, a reworking of the tale of Salome and John the Baptist.

This new edition is a completely new translation with a new introduction by Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert's acclaimed biographer. It features a chronology, further reading, and explanantory notes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.