Discoveries

The Kill

A Novel

Emile Zola, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer

The Modern Library:

300 pp., $25.95

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WHEN “La Curee” (“The Kill”), the second in Emile Zola’s series of 20 novels on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Rougon-Macquart family, was published in 1871, it was censored for its “gross materialism.” It has been translated twice before (most recently in 1954) but fell out of print. A relentless work, with decadence in every detail, it is a novel about decay, the death of morality, the corruption of the spirit, the transformation of Paris into a city of greed and heartless development driven by a few desperate men whose only goal is profit. La curee, in French, is the meat fed to the hounds after a hunt. Monsieur Rougon (who has changed his name to Saccard because it reminds him of the clinking of coins) agrees to marry 19-year-old Renee, the daughter of a wealthy Parisian, after her boarding school debauchery has ended in pregnancy. He brings a teenage son, Maxime, by a previous marriage, and it is only a matter of years before Renee and Maxime are involved in an incestuous relationship. On a separate stage, Rougon schemes to redesign the face of Paris, destroying homes, buying properties and falsifying records. The novel is crammed with exotic, expensive things -- clothing, furniture, jewelry, even “strange plants whose foliage derived an odd vitality from the splendor of poisonous blossoms both light and dark.” After Renee has been stripped to nothing by her husband and his son, her lover, she dies, mercifully, leaving behind little more than an outrageous bill from her dressmaker, most aptly named Monsieur Worms.

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Cooking & Stealing

The Tin House Nonfiction Reader

Bloomsbury: 322 pp.,

$15.95 paper

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An anthology is a sort of rite of passage for a literary journal, an announcement: We are here and we are not going to go away for a while. These essays give a taste of the quirkiness that assures a wide readership for “Tin House.” Young but established writers (like Amy Bloom, Rick Moody, Jeffrey Eugenides) are given an extra slap on the rump and allowed to run a little bit wild. (The already wild ones are allowed to tighten their laces and even use footnotes.) Many are about a book or a person that helped form the writer’s identity; David Shields writes about Bill Murray, Katie Roiphe about Graham Greene and Christopher Merrill about his friend the poet Agha Shahid Ali. Others, like Kathryn Harrison’s wonderful “Nit-Pickers,” describe breakdown moments and attendant revelations (her battle with her children’s head lice). The most marvelous thing about these essays is their sharp cut to the core -- they end suddenly, like the best conversations.

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Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore

A Novel

Ray Loriga, translated from the Spanish by John King

Grove: 260 pp., $12 paper

“Ever since the newspapers started saying that the world is going to end, songs have seemed shorter and the days longer.” How would the main character in “Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore” know? He’s a “memory murderer,” a pusher who travels the world selling a chemical called STM, or “short-term memory eroder.” He sells long-term memory eroder too, and antidepressants, “not like the cheap and cheerful ones that the secretaries in California take. With these ones you can stay in the bath when the water has gone out and god knows there’s nothing sadder than that.” It is not unusual for him to have cookies, beer and cocaine for breakfast, followed by champagne and mescal in the afternoon. He has trouble remembering the evenings. He’s happy with his life in love hotels and motels from Arizona to Bangkok, until he refuses a job in Brazil and his “Company” threatens to send him back to the recreational drug division. It’s a nihilist’s novel, a portrait of a disintegrating mind; some of the words this bloke uses almost slide right off the page. His failed profundities threaten to grind the book to a halt but a plot kicks in just in time.