Cover of Plague, Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

Plague, Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

by Unknown Author

5.0
(2 ratings)
704 pages2004EverymanISBN 9781857152784

About this book

From the Publisher: From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century-two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913-1960) deployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning. The Plague-written in 1947 and still profoundly relevant-is a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall (1956), which takes the form of an astonishing confession by a French lawyer in a seedy Amsterdam bar, is a haunting parable of modern conscience in the face of evil. The six stories of Exile and the Kingdom (1957) represent Camus at the height of his narrative powers, masterfully depicting his characters-from a renegade missionary to an adulterous wife-at decisive moments of revelation. Set beside their fictional counterparts, Camus's famous essays "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "Reflections on the Guillotine" are all the more powerful and philosophically daring, confirming his towering place in twentieth-century thought.

Publication Details

Publisher
Everyman
Published
2004
Pages
704
ISBN
9781857152784

About Unknown Author

Albert Camus was a French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century and his most famous work is the novel *L'Étranger* (*The Stranger*). In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature - after Rudyard Kipling - when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award. He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime, but Camus himself rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…"

Track your reading journey with BookOwl