The Kill

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.