Madame Bovary

BOOK SUMMARY

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was born in Rouen, France, and was brought to popular attention when Madame Bovary was deemed immoral by the French government.

Lydia Davis (translator) is a MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters and was awarded the 2011 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. She lives near Albany, New York.

PRAISE

"Flaubert's masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." — Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review

"Invigorating . . . Davis has a finer ear for the natural cadences of English, in narrative and dialogue, than any of her predecessors." — Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books

"One of the most important books of the year . . . Flaubert's strict, elegant, rhythmic sentences come alive in Davis's English." — James Wood, The New Yorker's Book Bench

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Trade paperback 384 pages
Fiction / literary
Series: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
Dimensions: 8.4 in (H) | 5.7 in (W) | 1 in (T)