Émile Zola, one of the most renowned figures in world literature, was a prolific writer and the leader of the then-new naturalist school. His torrential novels rank him among the leading exponents of the naturalist novel in the 19th century. It is less well known that Zola belongs, chronologically, after Flaubert and before Maupassant, to the pantheon of great writers who excelled in the genres of the short story and the novella.
Translator Phoebus I. Piombino seeks to shed light on this aspect of his literary work, which remains largely unknown to the general reading public, through an anthology of fourteen stories dating from 1864 to 1876, presented here for the first time in Greek.
These are: ‘The Beggar’s Alms’, ‘The Old Horse’, ‘The Resort’, ‘A Victim of Advertising’, ‘The Snow’, ‘A Cage of Wild Beasts’, ‘The Story of a Madman’, ‘The Centenarian’, ‘What Poor Girls Dream Of’, ‘Catherine’, ‘The Marquise’s Shoulders’, ‘My Neighbour Jacques’, ‘Unemployment’, and ‘How People Die and Are Buried in France’. The edition is supplemented by notes on each story and a chronology featuring a fairly extensive chronological table listing Émile Zola’s complete works.
- Pages: 180
- ISBN: 978-960-9527-43-9
- Publication: 2012
- Dimensions: 14 x 20,5
- Categories: Literature, Books, Foreign Literature
"...Émile Zola is a bourgeois flâneur of Paris and the French countryside. It is from there that he draws inspiration for his varied themes, which cover the entire spectrum of life, which he clothes in impressionistic prose. He soaks up the atmosphere of his era and, as a writer with a masterful pen reminiscent of a painter’s palette, records what his friends Manet, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec paint...."
– Yannis Antoniadis culturenow.grEmile Zola
Émile Zola was born in Paris on 2 April 1840. Following his first success, the novel *Thérèse Raquin* (1867), he conceived the idea of a great "realistic and scientific" novel in several volumes, the story of a family, the Rougon-Macquarts, set during the Second Empire, a work that would take 22 years to complete. In 1877, his novel *The Tavern* brought him widespread recognition, whilst the publication of *Nana* (1880) caused a scandal. He played a significant role in the Dreyfus affair with his impassioned article "J’accuse".
He died of smoke inhalation on 29 September 1902, in his Paris flat, due to a blocked chimney. Although the police ruled that his death was an accident, given the number of enemies he had made during the Dreyfus affair, rumours of his murder continued to preoccupy public opinion.
