Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, a leader and theorist of the literary movement of naturalism, an enthusiastic researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights defender and publicist, who influenced all realistic directions in literature of the 20th century and primarily — the school of "new journalism": Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. His most famous work is the epoch-making twenty-volume cycle "Les Rougon-Macquart", which opens before the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is an encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces, based on several generations of one family that 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 fourth, fifth, and sixth novels of the cycle, and they sound fresh and relevant even after a century and a half. Before the astonished public, in bustling Paris, a financial pyramid is built and collapses, a creation of a charming lover of profit; a poor orphan learns life lessons from saints; and in the backwater town of Plassans, the birthplace of the Rougons and the Macquarts, the local society falls at the feet of a visiting priest, a careerist and a Pharisee. The novels "Dream" and "Conquest of Plassans" are published in new translations. Some illustrations by Nathan Altman for the novel "Money" are published for the first time.
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