For a Night of Love »

In these three short stories, Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfillment—romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, they give us an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores.

When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favors to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbor’s interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; church–going women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest—beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception and discontent. With a Foreword by A.N. Wilson.

Kirkus Reviews

Religion, money, and sex are the general subjects of these three arresting (previously untranslated) short stories by the French master of documentary realism and bloodcurdling melodrama. The brief "Fasting" (1870) offers sardonic views of a gluttonous curate and the suggestible "little baroness" titillated and aroused by his thunderous homilies. "Nantas" (1878) chronicles the self-delusion and the awakening of a young man on the make in 1870s Paris. And the mordant title story, clearly akin to Zola's early potboiler Thérèse Raquin, crisply portrays a murderous hoyden who casually rids herself of two adoring, emptyheaded lovers. For those who find Zola insufferably turgid, this racy little volume is the perfect antidote.