Émile Zola — one of the pillars of world realistic literature, leader and theorist of the naturalism literary movement, an avid researcher of everyday life, passionate advocate and publicist, who influenced all realistic trends in 20th-century literature and above all — the school of «new journalism»: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. His most famous work — the epochal twenty-volume cycle «Rougon-Macquart», opens before the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. This is an encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces based on the experiences of several generations of one family, which bore the strangest fruits, — a dizzying epic in its detail and scale, where there is everything: greed and selflessness, love for one’s neighbor and bestial passion, lofty aspirations and everyday routine, pride, cruelty, cynicism, and violence, rise and fall of the strong and weak of this world. This illustrated edition includes the seventh and eighth novels of the cycle — a deep immersion into the life of Parisian bourgeoisie, a panorama that is comical, sometimes touching, but more often terrifying. Octave Mouret, a pragmatist and womanizer, arrives in Paris, where he rises to the top, seducing women and gaining the trust of men. He inherits and expands the store «Women's Happiness» — his pride, a manifestation of an effective and cynical approach to trade and advertising, — but all this dazzling brilliance dims when Mouret meets Denise Baudu, a modest saleswoman who unwittingly wins his heart... The novel «Foam» is published in a magnificent new translation.
