For a Night of Love (Hesperus Classics) - Softcover

'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 Therese 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.' --Kirkus Reviews

'This is the master of the naturalistic novel-sequence being minutely kinky, exploring the psychopathologies of every day life in provincial France with precision and relish.' --Indian Telegraph

'For a Night of Love... is an elegant tale (commendations to translator Andrew Brown) and psychologically acute' --Literary Review

In these three short stories, Émile 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; and churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest. These are beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception and discontent.