Madame Bovary a new translation by Lydia Davis Published by Viking/Penguin

The must-have deluxe edition of the fantastically acclaimed new translation of one of the world's most celebrated novels.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs in an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, she takes drastic action, with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter. In this landmark new translation of Gustave Flaubert's masterwork, award-winning writer and translator Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of Flaubert's legendary prose style, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.

"[Flaubert's] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves."
—Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review

"[Davis] has a finer ear for the natural cadences of English, in narrative and dialogue, than any of her predecessors, and there are many moments in her Madame Bovary when one pauses to admire how clean and spare a sentence seems by comparison with its earlier translated versions. . . . Only a very good writer indeed could have written it. . . . The bones of the original French show clearly through her English, and the rawness of her translation is, on the whole, invigorating."
—Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books

"Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. . . . [Her] work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control. . . . Davis's Madame Bovary is a linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English."
—Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

"How tickled Madame Bovary herself would be by the latest homage paid to her. . . . I'm grateful to Davis for luring me back to Madame Bovary and for giving us a version which strikes me as elegant and alive."
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

About the Author
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was born in Rouen, France, and was brought to popular attention when Madame Bovary was deemed immoral by the French government.

Lydia Davis-MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award finalist, and Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters-was awarded the 2003 French- American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. She lives near Albany, New York.