Gustave Flaubert

At convent school, a girl acquires romantic notions of a lover who will live for her alone. She marries a kind but dull country doctor and discovers that "This life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart." Emma …

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents …

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880. Although it was conceived in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes, and partially inspired by a short story of Barthélemy Maurice, Flaubert did not begin the work in earnest until 1872, at a time when financial …

The Temptation of Saint Anthony is a book which the French author Gustave Flaubert spent practically his whole life fitfully working on, in three versions he completed in 1849, 1856 and 1872 before publishing the final version in 1874. It takes as its subject the famous temptation faced by Saint Anthony the Great in …