Showing results for "Zola" in All Categories

Gordon's name was a joke. It was given to him by Anthony Zola, a controlling, and abusive father, to taunt his wife over her love of cheese, and the fact that she had been steadily gaining weight since their marriage. Andrea was a doting mother, and maybe a little overprotective of her boy, but she didn't see that as a bad thing. On discovering a secret, one the child had been told to keep to himself, everything changes. Now she must do whatever she needs to keep her, and her boy, alive. Needs must.

La spéculation, telle qu'elle se pratique de nos jours, naît sous le Second Empire. Aristide Rougon, dit Saccard, le promoteur immobilier de "La Curée", réapparait ici en conquérant de la finance.Le "jeu" capitaliste enflamme les passions des grandes fortunes comme des classes laborieuses. Zola démonte le mécanisme des opérations boursières et scrute les personnages typiques du milieu de l'argent.

Germinal is one of the most striking novels in the French tradition. Widely regarded as Zola's masterpiece, the novel describes the working conditions of French coalminers in the 1860s in harsh and realistic terms. It is visceral, graphic, and unrelenting. Its strong socialist principles and vivid accounts of the miners' strikes meant that the novel became a key symbol in the workers' fight against oppression, with chants of "Germinal! Germinal!" resonating high above the author's funeral.

Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) plays out in a colossal and opulent Parisian department store of the same name. Its owner, Octave Mouret, builds his innovative, upmarket women’s fashion empire at the expense of the city’s smaller, traditional shops.

"Je veux vous expliquer comment une famille, un petit groupe d'êtres, se comporte dans une société, en s'épanouissant pour donner naissance à dix, à vingt individus, qui paraissent, au premier coup d'oeil, profondément dissemblables, mais que l'analyse montre intimement liés les uns aux autres. L'hérédité a ses lois, comme la pesanteur." Emile Zola.

After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business, and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation, and violence.

Once upon a time, a teenaged Kate Winslet (The Reader, Titanic, Revolutionary Road) received a gift that would leave a lasting impression: a copy of Emile Zola’s classic Thérèse Raquin. Six Academy Award nominations and one Best Actress award later, she steps behind the microphone to perform this haunting classic of passion and disaster.

Iron Cross – The Bomb! The war escalates in Tom Zola’s explosive alternate history series! February 1945. The Eastern Front is frozen in mud and blood, and Germany’s fate hangs by a thread. While Colonel General Zeitzler plots a desperate strike with the help of Stalin’s own betrayer, soldiers at the front fight their own battles – against the Soviets, against hunger and cold, and against the gnawing despair of a war that seems endless. In the chaos of intrigue, shifting loyalties, and brutal combat, a single spark could change the course of history – or ignite the final ...

Iron Cross – Never Surrender! The thrilling first entry in Tom Zola’s explosive alternate history series! November 1942: Adolf Hitler dies unexpectedly in a plane crash. With the Nazi Party dismantled, Germany’s military takes full control. But with the war turning against them, the German High Command has only one goal: Victory at all costs through their tactical knowledge! As the Allies prepare their invasion and Soviet forces gain ground, Germany’s panzer divisions launch a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble to crush the Red Army at Kursk… Tom Zola, a former German Army sergeant,...

Against the backdrop of political and legal corruption in Second Empire France, La Bête Humaine (1890) contrasts the technological advancements of the Machine Age with the primitive and timeless human impulse to possess through killing and to kill through possession. The lives of two railwaymen on the Paris-to-Le-Havre line are fatally entwined by their love for the same woman in this shocking account of brutal violence, greed, revenge, and repression.

Octave Mouret, précurseur inspiré, bouleverse sa corporation comme Haussmann bouleverse la ville. Il parie tout sur les femmes, sur leurs envies et sur leur incapacité à surmonter les tentations.
Une lui résiste : Denise, incarnation de la vertu et de la générosité. Elle devient une obsession pour cet ogre.

His Excellency Eugène Rougon is the sixth novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It has only rarely been published in English and this new translation aims to bring this great and almost unknown novel to a new public. 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 ambitious and ruthless politician surrounded by a cotérie of equally ambitious and greedy hangers-on. In a world where what is said is usually far from what is meant, where all are manouevring against all, where ...

Zola’s La Terre (The Earth) proved highly controversial on publication in 1887 and still retains the power to shock. It follows the fortunes of the Fouan family in the years leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. Old Fouan, the patriarch, draws up a legal contract to divide his farmland between his three children in exchange for an allowance that will support him and his wife through a comfortable retirement.

Against a backdrop of modernisation, extravagant luxury, political intrigue and sexual immorality, Saccard treats close relationships as money-making opportunities and loved ones as mere commodities. As one character puts it: ‘You see, everything is fine, as long as you make money from it.’

The Dream is the sixteenth volume in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series of novels of the Second Empire. In The Dream, a young girl is found huddled in a church doorway the morning after Christmas day. She is taken in and raised by a family of embroiderers, in happy innocence and far from the harsh realities of the world. With them she learns a trade, and loses herself in a dreamlike world of religious belief and hope. She dreams of marrying the most handsome, richest and most noble man, and living a life of idyllic happiness with him. But, can a foundling girl, unloved by her natural parents, ...

Étienne Lantier, mécanicien au chômage, erre sur les routes du nord de la France. Au hasard d'une rencontre, frigorifié et mort de faim, il finit par trouver un emploi dans la mine du Voreux. Il découvre alors les conditions inhumaines du travail et la misère de la vie de mineur. Mais, les conditions économiques étant au plus bas, la Compagnie propriétaire du Voreux essaie de baisser encore leurs maigres salaires.

Iron Cross – Heavy Water! The war escalates in Tom Zola’s explosive alternate history series! August 1945: Major Dan Doyle’s hand-picked Marines ride experimental Sikorsky “Albatross” helicopters off the carrier USS Goose into occupied Norway on D-Day of Operation Borealis. Their objective: Rjukan—where the Reich’s revived heavy-water program hides in an underground maze that may be weeks from delivering the bomb. From the fjords to the forests, corporal Tony “Pizza” Saviano, the zealot Alex Mason, and a lethal cadre fight through ambushes, betrayals, and their own demons ...

Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Saccard meanwhile conducts his love life as energetically as he does his business, and his empire is seemingly unstoppable.

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognized artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling painter who dreams of conquering the Paris art scene with his revolutionary "open air" style of painting. Discouraged and mocked, Claude retreats to the countryside with a young woman from Clermont, with whom he has fallen in love, before returning to Paris, where he continues to experience rejection at every turn.

Octave Mouret (le futur héros du "Bonheur des dames"), débarque à Paris et devient le nouveau locataire d'un immeuble bourgeois de six étages, situé rue de Choiseul. Il découvre rapidement que dans cette demeure en apparence de réputation irréprochable, les intrigues font partie de la vie courante des habitants. Derrière une belle façade se dissimule une cour intérieure d'où émanent des odeurs nauséabondes dues aux détritus des cuisines que les domestiques jettent par les fenêtres. Et par analogie, derrière cette respectable façade, existe un puant cloaque moral.