Les Misérables

Few novels ever swept across the world with such overpowering impact as Les Mis rables. Within 24 hours, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities of the world it was devoured with equal relish.

Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Mis rables is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.

Author: Victor Hugo
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 09/29/1996
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9780449911679
ISBN10: 0449911675
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Classics
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | War & Military

About the Author
Victor Hugo (1802-85), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today's most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs. Hugo was elected to the Académie Française in 1841. As a statesman, he was named a Peer of France in 1845. He served in France's National Assemblies in the Second Republic formed after the 1848 revolution, and in 1851 went into self-imposed exile upon the ascendance of Napoleon III, who restored France's government to authoritarian rule. Hugo returned to France in 1870 after the proclamation of the Third Republic.

Julie Rose's acclaimed translations include Alexandre Dumas's The Knight of Maison-Rouge and Racine's Phèdre, as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN medallion for translation and the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize.

Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate, and editor of the Library of America anthology Americans in Paris. He writes on various subjects for The New Yorker and has written introductions to works by Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, and Alain-Fournier.