The Kill

Zola, Emile; Goldhammer, Arthur (Transl.)

ISBN 10: 0679642749 / ISBN 13: 9780679642749

Published by Modern Library (an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group), New York, 2004

About this Item

First Modern Library edition, hardcover, has a mild skew to the binding, shallow bowing to the covers, and very light bumps to the spine ends. Otherwise, this is a solid, tight Very Good+ copy in a like unclipped dust jacket, which has minor wear to the spine ends and corners, and a touch of rubbing to the covers. The jacket is wrapped in a Mylar cover.

Seller Inventory # 106281

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Kill
• Publisher: Modern Library (an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group), New York
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679642749
• ISBN 13: 9780679642749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition Thus.
• Condition: Very Good+
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Fiction

About this title

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.

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.