Best Selling Books by Victor HUGO

Although best known as the author of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo was primarily a poet—one of the most important and prolific in French history. Despite his renown, however, there are few comprehensive collections of his verse available and even fewer translated editions. Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo''s essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo''s oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time. More than half of this volume''s eight thousand lines of verse appear here for the first time in English, providing readers with a new perspective on each of the fascinating periods of Hugo''s career and aspects of his style. Introductions to each section guide the reader through the stages of Hugo''s writing, while notes on individual poems provide information not found in even the most detailed French-language editions. Illustrated with Hugo''s own paintings and drawings, this lucid translation—available on the eve of Hugo''s bicentenary—pays homage to this towering figure of nineteenth-century literature by capturing the energy of his poetry, the drama and satirical force of his language, and the visionary beauty of his writing as a whole.

Victor-Marie Hugo, in full Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country''s greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).In France, Hugo''s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo''s views changed as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon.-wikipedia

Flames light the horizon; the year is 1793. In Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo’s last novel, the French Revolution’s most tumultuous year becomes an arena where human ideals clash with human imperfections. Published in 1874, when Hugo was in his seventies, this work stands as a grand and grave epilogue to his career – a novel of war and conscience that distills a lifetime of thought about revolution, heroism, and the price of fanatical righteousness. As Victor Hugo’s valedictory novel, Ninety-Three holds a special place. It is at once a thrilling yarn of escape, siege, and battle, and a meditation on the revolution that forged modern France. In it, the grand homme of letters funneled his decades of insight into a story that is leaner but no less potent than his earlier works. To read Ninety-Three is to witness a literary giant grappling with the eternal question of how to reconcile liberty, equality, and fraternity when the cannon smoke rolls in. In the end, Hugo leaves us not with an easy answer but with an image – a young idealist sacrificing himself on the altar of principle, and an old zealot realizing too late that principle without pity can destroy even what it seeks to save. This powerful conclusion ensures that Ninety-Three, Hugo’s final gift to literature, remains both a stirring historical epic and a poignant warning that echoes across the ages. Upon its publication, Quatrevingt-treize (as the title reads in French) was met with great interest and respect. Hugo had only recently returned to France after long years in exile; the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (both in the early 1870s) had convulsed the nation, and readers understood that Hugo was now looking further back in history to shed light on those contemporary scars. He chose 1793 – the year of the guillotine’s frenzy, of the Vendée uprising, of the Republic fighting for its life – as a mirror to examine the cycle of violence and idealism that France seemed destined to repeat. Critics noted Hugo’s even-handed approach: unlike earlier writers who vilified one side or the other, Hugo strove to portray both royalists and republicans with empathy and tragic nuance. Some observers in 1874 were surprised that the ardent republican Hugo could humanize a monarchist insurgent, but he did exactly that. The novel’s nuanced perspective earned it acclaim as a mature work of insight. Though Ninety-Three did not achieve the blockbuster popularity of Les Misérables, it was praised for its intense drama and its poetic gravitas, and it quickly found a place in the canon of French literature as the closing chapter of Hugo’s epic vision of humanity. This critical reader''s edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted to help the armchair philosopher engage deeply with Hugo''s works through clean, contemporary language and streamlined syntax that clarifies his expansive ideas. Additonal material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Hugo’s history, impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the themes and philosophical concepts he employs—emphasizing Romanticism, social justice, and moral idealism—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, highlighting the personal relationships (including his relationship with Dickens) and political commitments that shaped his vision.

PREFACE Notre-Dame de Paris Also known as: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the wall:-- ~ANArKH~. These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply. He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that soul in torment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving this stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church. Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding with the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two hundred years. Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them. Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,--nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth. It is upon this word that this book is founded. March, 1831.

The French title of the novel emphasizes Notre Dame''s (A French memorial) role as a symbol of Paris. Primarily novel is concerned with the theme of revolution and social strife. Hugo was profoundly concerned by the class differences that set the 1789 French Revolution in motion. Hugo acknowledges that fate plays a powerful role, but implies that free will is also possible.

Encompassing a multitude of plots, the narrative is bounded by the character of the protagonist, Jean Valjean. Expressing the author''s ideas about society, religion and politics, it is in the backdrop of Napoleonic Wars and ensuing years that the story unravels. Grace, moral philosophy, law and history of France are discussed.

"Les Miserables" is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description - site accessed 06/03/2013 http://www.booktopia.com.au/les-miserables-victor-hugo/prod9781853260858.html.

Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) is one of the most important works of nineteenth-century colonial fiction, and quite possibly the most sustained novelistic treatment of the Haitian Revolution by a major European author. This Broadview edition makes Hugo’s novel available in a completely new English translation, the first in over one hundred years. Set in 1791, during the first months of a slave revolt that would eventually lead to the creation of the black republic of Haiti in 1804, Bug-Jargal is a stirring tale of interracial friendship and rivalry, a provocative account of the ties that bind a young Frenchman to one of the rebel leaders and the tragic misunderstandings that threaten to sever those ties completely. This Broadview edition contains a critical introduction and a broad selection of appendices, including Hugo’s never-before-translated 1820 short story “Bug-Jargal,” contemporary reviews of the novel, documents pertaining to the young Hugo’s poetics and politics, and selections from his source materials about the Haitian Revolution.

A vast historical drama unfolds in Cromwell, where the fate of 17th-century England is staged with Shakespearean richness. In this sweeping five-act play, Victor Hugo paints the rise and inner torment of Oliver Cromwell – regicide, ruler, and restless giant of history – in lines of verse that leap from lofty to earthy, from palace intrigue to haunted midnight soliloquy. In 1827, Hugo boldly published Cromwell as a closet drama of unprecedented scope, a play so epic in length (nearly 7,000 lines) that no theater could realistically perform it in full at the time. The play’s preface, however, achieved its own immortality: a fiery manifesto that shattered the old rules of French classicism and heralded the Romantic revolution on stage. Hugo’s declaration that drama must mingle the sublime and the grotesque – just as life does – stunned the literary establishment and electrified young writers across Europe. Though the play itself went largely unperformed (its frequent scene changes and colossal cast made it impractical to stage), the ideas in its introduction spread like wildfire, challenging censors and captivating a generation yearning for new creative freedom. Written under a repressive French monarchy, the play uses England’s past to comment obliquely on Hugo’s present – celebrating republican ideals while warning of power’s corruptions. Its famous preface explicitly argues that art must break free of artificial constraints, reflecting the full range of human experience. That document became a cornerstone of French Romanticism, cited for decades as the moment the “modern drama” was born. Although Cromwell the play remained largely a literary experience (an “unstageable” epic read more often than seen), its legacy lived on in every Romantic triumph that followed – from Hugo’s own Hernani to the works of Dumas and Musset. Ambitious, unwieldy, but intellectually exhilarating, Cromwell stands as a testament to Victor Hugo’s conviction that the theater of ideas could transform culture, even if the physical stage was not quite ready for his vision. This critical reader''s edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted to help the armchair philosopher engage deeply with Victor Hugo''s works through clean, contemporary language and streamlined syntax that clarifies his expansive ideas. Supplementary material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Hugo’s history, impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the themes and philosophical concepts he employs—emphasizing Romanticism, social justice, and moral idealism—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, highlighting the personal relationships (including his relationship with Charles Dickens) and political commitments that shaped his vision.

"Under Sentence of Death - Or, a Criminal''s Last Hours" is a fictional account of the trial and sentencing of a man that ultimately leads to his death. A thought-provoking insight to a criminal''s last moments, "Under Sentence of Death" is not to be missed by fans of Hugo''s work, and it would make for a worthy addition to any collection. Victor Marie Hugo (1802 - 1885) was a French novelist, dramatist, and poet belonging to the Romantic movement. He is widely hailed as one of the most accomplished and well-known French writers, originally achieving renown for his poetical endeavours-the most notable of which are the volumes "Les Contemplations" and "La Légende des siècles". Outside of his native country, Hugo''s best-known works are his novels: "Les Misérables" (1862) and "Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), commonly known as "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame". We are proudly republishing this vintage detective novel now in a brand new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris) is an 1831 French novel written by Victor Hugo. It is set in 1482 in Paris, in and around the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. The book tells the story of a poor barefoot Gypsy girl (La Esmeralda) and a misshapen bell-ringer (Quasimodo) who was raised by the Archdeacon (Claude Frollo). The book was written as a statement to preserve the Notre Dame cathedral and not to ''modernize'' it, as Hugo was thoroughly against this.The story begins during the Renaissance in 1482, the day of the Festival of Fools in Paris. Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, is introduced by his crowning as Pope of Fools.Esm�ralda, a beautiful 16-year-old gypsy with a kind and generous heart, captures the hearts of many men but especially Quasimodo''s adopted father, Claude Frollo. Frollo is torn between his lust and the rules of the church. He orders Quasimodo to get her. Quasimodo is caught and whipped and ordered to be tied down in the heat. Esm�ralda seeing his thirst, offers him water. It saves her, for she captures the heart of the hunchback.