Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, France, and did not leave his birth city until he was 19 when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was November, a novella. In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His exploration of themes of spiritual torment was just the beginning of Flaubert's controversial subject choices. His frank and realistic display of the sex, adultery, and other goings-on in bourgeois France in Madame Bovary saw him go on trial for immorality, charges he only narrowly escaped. He died in 1880.

Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris. She is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist, and Can’t and Won’t, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called “a grand cumulative achievement” and “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” by James Wood in The New Yorker and “one of the great books in recent literature” by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York.

Kate Reading is the recipient of three AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has narrated everything from Patricia Cornwell to George Eliot. Her favorite BOT recordings include Like Water for Chocolate, Middlemarch, and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Times series, which she narrated with her husband, Michael Kramer.

Gustave Flaubert grew up in Rouen, France, and did not leave his birth city until he was 19 when he went to study law in Paris. After three years, however, Flaubert abandoned law and began writing. His first finished work was November, a novella. In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His exploration of themes of spiritual torment was just the beginning of Flaubert's controversial subject choices. His frank and realistic display of the sex, adultery, and other goings-on in bourgeois France in Madame Bovary saw him go on trial for immorality, charges he only narrowly escaped. He died in 1880.

Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris. She is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist, and Can’t and Won’t, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called “a grand cumulative achievement” and “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” by James Wood in The New Yorker and “one of the great books in recent literature” by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York.

Kate Reading is the recipient of three AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has narrated everything from Patricia Cornwell to George Eliot. Her favorite BOT recordings include Like Water for Chocolate, Middlemarch, and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Times series, which she narrated with her husband, Michael Kramer.