The Kill

Description

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.
Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Émile Zola,Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)
Published: 07/12/2005
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 9780812966374
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 0.70″ H x 8.10″ L x 5.30″ W

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.