Manette Salomon

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Translated by Tina Kover

With an Introduction by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

“I received both volumes at eleven o’clock this morning and I’ve just finished them. In other words, my dear fellows, Manette Salomon has enraptured me for an entire day. It’s stunning, dazzling, intoxicating. I have tears in my eyes. So I must unleash these feelings on you, without pausing to sort them out first.”

So wrote Flaubert, in a letter to the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt on November 13th, 1867. And his enthusiasm was certainly not unfounded, for Manette Salomon, here superbly translated for the first time into English by Tina Kover, is undoubtedly one of the greatest novels about art ever written, sitting easily between Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece and Zola’s L’Oeuvre, the latter work Edmond de Goncourt even going so far as to say was nothing but a rewriting of it.

This is one of the masterpieces of European literature—a panorama of the world of the painters of France during the mid-nineteenth century—the schools, the studios, the salons—the successes and failures, the magnificent inspirations and the crushing disillusions of the artists.

About the Author
Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) and his brother Jules de Goncourt (1830–1970), were early exponents of the Naturalist school of writing. Working always in collaboration, until the death of the younger, they produced novels such as Renée Mauperin (1864), and Germinie Lacerteux (1865), histories such as La Femme au XVIIIe siècle (1862), and La du Barry (1878), essays on eighteenth-century artists, and a nine volume Journal, 1887–1896. After the death of his brother Jules, Edmond alone wrote a number of other novels, including La Fille Elisa (1878), and Les Frères Zemganno (1879), and also wrote monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai.

About the Translator
Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, Benoît Peeters’ Hergé: Son of Tintin, and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.
For Snuggly Books she has also translated Paridaiza and Who killed the Poet by Luis de Miranda, and The Beauty of the Death Cap by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze.
Tina Kover lives in the northeast of England.

Paperback, 404 pages. Release date: November 27, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-94381-350-6
Price: US$27.50

Hardcover, 406 pages. Limited Edition 60 copies.
Release date: November 27, 2017
Price: US$38.00