Albert Camus, a French author of Algerian origin, is renowned for his exploration of the absurd and the human revolt against it. His works often grapple with themes of alienation, the search for meaning, and moral order in a godless world. Camus's prose is characterized by its purity, intensity, and rationality, reflecting his relentless ethical inquiry. His literary legacy lies in its urgent lessons on embracing absurdity with hope and refusing despair.
Featuring the most significant lectures and speeches of a Nobel Prize winner, this collection presents a fresh English translation by Quintin Hoare. It showcases the enduring impact of the author's ideas and insights, making it a vital resource for those interested in their influential thoughts and contributions. This marks the first time these important works are available in English, enriching the understanding of the author's legacy.
Set against the historical backdrop of Paris, the narrative unfolds during a tumultuous August night where the city is alive with revolutionary fervor. Barricades are erected as citizens rise to reclaim their freedom, highlighting themes of justice and sacrifice. The stark imagery of water and stone enhances the gravity of the struggle, emphasizing the deep-rooted fight for liberty that echoes through the city's history.
Introduction by David Bellos
This collection showcases the profound works of Albert Camus, featuring two novels, six short stories, and two essays. Through his lyrical prose, Camus confronts existential despair, offering a powerful affirmation of human resilience amidst an indifferent universe. His exploration of themes such as absurdity and the search for meaning reflects his status as one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers.
From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea. These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. In 1957 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is intriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at first seemed promising, and explore different types of experience. Although the Notebooks may have served Camus as a practice ground, the prose is of superior quality, which makes a short spontaneous vignette or a moment of sensuous beauty quickly captured on the page a small work of art.Here is a record of one of the most unusual minds of our time.
"Four thought-provoking masterworks for the theater by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, in a restorative new American translation by Ryan Bloom that brings together, for the first time in English, Camus's final versions of the plays, along with deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue. Though known for his novels that plumb the depths of absurdism, it was the theater stage that Camus called "one of the only places in the world I'm happy." After forming two troupes in his early twenties in Algeria, the prolific author moved to Paris for work, where between 1944-1949 he would go on to stage the four original plays gathered in this collection. Caligula, his first full-length work for the stage, begins with the infamous Roman emperor in the throes of grief at the death of his sister Drusilla and tugs at the same essential question that haunts so much of Camus's work: Faced with the nullifying force of time, which snuffs out even our grandest emotions, how does one go on living? And is there a limit to the hardness of the human heart? Here too are The Misunderstanding, a murderous tangle of the longing for home and the longing for elsewhere; The Just, depicting the 1905 assassination of a Grand Duke in Moscow and testing the ethical limits of one's belief in a political cause; and State of Emergency, an allegorical romp where The Plague itself appears as a central character, shedding new light on our current battles with viral disease and authoritarian regimes"-- Provided by publisher
This final volume, recorded over the last nine years of his life, takes on the characteristics of a personal diary.--[book jacket].
Brings together a collection of the writer's novels, short stories, and essays, including "The Plague," a tale of survival and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic, and "The Fall," in which a French lawyer makes an astonishing confession.
From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea. These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. In 1957 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is intriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at first seemed promising, and explore different types of experience. Although the Notebooks may have served Camus as a practice ground, the prose is of superior quality, which makes a short spontaneous vignette or a moment of sensuous beauty quickly captured on the page a small work of art.Here is a record of one of the most unusual minds of our time.
Originally published in French: Paris: Gallimard, 1958.
Inspired by the myth of a man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain and watch it roll back to the valley below, 'The Myth of Sisyphus' transformed 20th century philosophy with its impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning
