Nana is the ninth novel in Émile Zola's monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series and a landmark of French Naturalism. Published in 1880, the book is a scathing and brutal critique of the moral decay at the heart of French society during the Second Empire. The story follows the rise and fall of Nana Coupeau, the daughter of Gervaise Macquart from L'Assommoir. Beginning as a penniless streetwalker, Nana uses her raw, animalistic sexuality to ascend to the pinnacle of Parisian society as a celebrated actress and high-class courtesan. Zola portrays her not as a villain, but as a product of her environment and heredity, a force of nature whose very body becomes a weapon of social destruction. Through her, the novel exposes the corruption of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the financial elite, as a succession of men—a count, a banker, a military officer—are systematically ruined, financially and morally, by their obsession with her. Nana's lavish lifestyle and insatiable appetites mirror the excesses of the era, and her eventual, gruesome death from smallpox, which disfigures her beautiful body, serves as a powerful symbol of the putrefaction lurking beneath the glittering surface of the Empire. Nana is a shocking and masterful study of sex, power, and the commodification of the human body.

Table of Contents:

• Nana. Part 1

• Nana. Part 2

• Nana. Part 3

• Nana. Part 4

• Nana. Part 5

• Nana. Part 6

• Nana. Part 7

• Nana. Part 8