Includes Flaubert's Dictionary of received ideas.

Among all the works of this brilliant writer, Bouvard and Pecuchet is definitely the deepest, the most thorough, the broadest... It is the Tower of Babel of the sciences, where all the diverse, opposing, and absolute doctrines -- each having its own language -- demonstrate the powerlessness of effort, the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal 'misery of everything.' --Guy de Maupassant Flaubert inspires in me an affection that I don't feel for any other writer. --Jean Echenoz In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert created an encyclopedia of the sciences in a way that emphasizes all the laws and failures of knowledge, and at the same time, he did so in a way that breaks the forms of literature itself. --Claudine Cohen, Alliage

Known for his scrupulous devotion to his art and perfectionist style, French writer Gustave Flaubert is counted among the greatest Western novelists, and influenced such writers as Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee. Flaubert is best known for Madame Bovary, for which he was prosecuted (and acquitted) for offending public morals. His other works of note include Memoirs of a Madman, November, Salammb?, Sentimental Education, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. His work has been widely adapted for the stage and screen. Flaubert died in 1880. Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than thirty books from the French. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.