Kill

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’sThe Kill(La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author’s twenty-volumeRougon-Macquartsaga, 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 Killcontains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by “infernal intelligence.” In this new incarnation,The KilljoinsNanaandGerminalon the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who–explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting–always goes in for the kill. From the Hardcover edition.