The Kill - (Modern Library Classics) by Émile Zola (Paperback)

About the Book

"Here is a true publishing event: the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction's giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola's The Kill (La Curee) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a ... story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed"--From hardcover printing.

Book Synopsis

Here is a true publishing event-the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction's giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola's The Kill (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.

The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée's financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and "the capital of the nineteenth century." In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman's spirit and a city's soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world's premier translators from the French, The Kill contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by "infernal intelligence."

In this new incarnation, The Kill joins Nana and Germinal on the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who-explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting-always goes in for the kill.

Review Quotes

"Goldhammer's translation of Zola's satiric, transgressive tale--about, among other things, Paris, modernity, incest, and the order of the new--is a work of pure delight. And his introduction to the novel is simply brilliant." --Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: An American Financier
"Zola's ferocious, brutally direct novel of modern desire is made fully present in Arthur Goldhammer's new translation. It is Paris then, it is our city now. " -Jay Cantor, author of Great Neck and Krazy Kat
"Elegantly translated, with his customary urbane sparkle and precision, by Arthur Goldhammer, this new edition of The Kill is a pleasure to be savored." -Ella Taylor, film critic, LA Weekly

About the Author

Émile Zola was born in 1840 and worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. He wrote his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin, in 1867, and the publication of L'Assommoir ten years later made him the most famous writer in France. His work has influenced authors from August Strindberg to Theodore Dreiser to Tom Wolfe. He died in 1902.