"In Tales to Ninon (1864) and New Tales to Ninon (1874), Zola exposes all his talents, with the wonderful, the fantastic, the satire, the epic, and the realistic and narrative autobiography. He uses all the tones: humor, irony, pathos, seriousness and anger. These volumes of tales are a refraction of the whole work: they summarize ten years of literary production and announce themes, figures and forms that develop into the writer's greatest masterpieces"--cataloger's translation of back cover.