Read The Classics: Madame Bovary

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The Multnomah County Library invites you to take part in a new book series, where you can read some of the best all-time classics and discuss them under the leadership of Jay Dickson, Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. Participation is free, but registration is required. You can register online at http://www.multcolib.org/events/classics/1800.html
A limited number of books will be available free of charge for those who pre-register.

Immediately attacked by public prosecutors when it was serialized in 1856, Gustave Flaubert's most famous work, Madame Bovary, became an instant bestseller when it was published in book form the next year, and remains one of the most influential novels ever written. Its titular heroine, Emma Bovary, must contend with the colossal boredom of a respectable marriage to a dull physician in provincial France, and escapes into a world of romantic fiction and then into her own affairs of the heart. Emma's bourgeois daydreams, which precipitate her disastrous ending (and which gave rise to a whole new term, bovarysme), have raised questions for generations about the relations between romance and realism and between fiction and reality that will figure largely into our discussion of this best known of French 19th century novels.