Madame Bovary

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Author Gustave Flaubert

Introduction by Lydia Davis

Translated by Lydia Davis

Notes by Lydia Davis

Series Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

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The award-winning, nationally bestselling translation, by Lydia Davis, of one of the world’s most celebrated novels

“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…

$24.95

October 4, 2011

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Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, France, and did not leave his birth city until he was 19 when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was November, a novella. In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His exploration of themes of spiritual torment was just the beginning of Flaubert's controversial subject choices. His frank and realistic display of the sex, adultery, and other goings-on in bourgeois France in Madame Bovary saw him go on trial for immorality, charges he only narrowly escaped. He died in 1880.