Publisher's Synopsis
When you want to read in both French and English, though, there's a great option: bilingual books!Reading bilingual books and inferring the vocabulary and grammar is a far superior method of language learning than traditional memorization. It is also much less painful.Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel - an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s - has been published and translated in over one hundred countries and has additionally inspired five film adaptations and two television productions.Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'accuse. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.