Now a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti, Laura Carmichael, Ezra Miller, and Rhys Ifans, and directed by Sophie Barthes Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. When published in 1857, Madame Bovary was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for its heroine. Today the novel is considered the first masterpiece of realist fiction. In this landmark translation, Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of a style that has long beguiled readers of French, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.
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Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), French novelist and one of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction, was born in Rouen, the second son of a noted physician. Beset by ill health and personal misfortune, he led a solitary life of rigid discipline, which was reflected in his writing by his obsession with finding le mot juste (exactly the right word). His first published novel was Madame Bovary (1857). When certain passages in Madame Bovarywere judged to be offensive to public morals, Flaubert, his publisher, and his printer were tried but acquitted.
Michael Kramer is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, and recipient of a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award. He is also an actor and director in the Washington, DC, area, where he is active in the area’s theater scene and has appeared in productions at the Shakespeare Theatre, the Kennedy Center, and Theater J.