The Kill: Modern Library Classics

The incestuous affair of Ren e Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Ren e'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.