New Releases by Albert Camus

Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus''s essay is a searching inquiry into the origins of the hubris and fanaticism that laid waste to twentieth-century Europe.

hrough the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in English in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward. opsis 2: The Stranger is the enigmatic first novel by Albert Camus, published in French as L''Étranger in 1942. It was published as The Outsider in England and as The Stranger in the United States. Camus utilized The Stranger as a platform to explore absurdity, a concept central to his writings and at the core of his treatment of questions about the meaning of life. Camus''s concept of the absurd instead implored people to accept life''s lack of meaning and rebel by rejoicing in what life does offer. Elements of this philosophy can be seen in the protagonist, Meursault, as he refuses to behave as if there is meaning where there is none-or, as Camus himself put it in a preface to The Stranger, Meursault "does not play the game." Society thus feels threatened and cuts off Meursault''s head. Similar themes can be seen in Camus''s essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), also published in 1942. About the Author ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. After winning a degree in philosophy, he worked at various jobs, ending up in journalism. In the thirties he ran a theatrical company, and during the war was active in the French Resistance, editing an important underground paper, Combat. Among his major works are four widely praised works of fiction, The Stranger (1946), The Plague (1948), The Fall (1957), and Exile and the Kingdom (1958); a volume of plays, Caligula and Three Other Plays (1958); and two books of philosophical essays, The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), both of which are available in the Vintage series. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.

Written when execution by guillotine was still legal in France, Albert Camus'' devastating attack on the ''obscene exhibition'' of capital punishment remains one of the most powerful, persuasive arguments ever made against the death penalty.

The Nobel Prize winner''s most influential and enduring personal writings, newly curated and introduced by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus''s writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus''s personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought and humanize his most celebrated works.

A Nobel Prize-winning author delivers one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, showing a way out of despair and reaffirming the value of existence. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide—the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly presents a crucial exposition of existentialist thought.

l se trouve dans Le Mythe de Sisyphe o� l''auteur fran�ais Albert Camus pr�sente sa philosophie de l''absurde: l''id�e que l''humanit� dans son ensemble est bloqu� dans une boucle perp�tuelle en vains efforts pour essayer de trouver un sens dans un monde absurde. Il illustre son point avec un personnage c�l�bre de la mythologie grecque: Sisyphe a �t� condamn� par les dieux � rouler un rocher jusqu''au sommet d''une montagne, seulement pour retomber � l''endroit o� le premier commenc� et r�p�ter le processus un nombre infini de fois. -De Goodread

The Fall is the third and last novel of this philosopher, published in 1956. Within his work can identify the existentialist line of his thinking, also reflects the philosophy of the absurd in the sense of approval and disenchantment with the affirmation Of positive and negative qualities in the dignity and fraternity of the human being. Camus considered the absurdity of the human condition as a tragic inability to comprehend and transcend in every situation that involves the subject, the same lineage is exposed in the description of a seemingly irrational world in which the individual seeks his sense of life as he is Protagonist of this novel.

One of the most influential works of this century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.

The summation of the existentialist philosophy threaded throughout all his writing, Albert Camus'' The Myth of Sisyphus is translated by Justin O''Brien with an introduction by James Wood in Penguin Classics. In this profound and moving philosophical statement, Camus poses the fundamental question: is life worth living? If human existence holds no significance, what can keep us from suicide? As Camus argues, if there is no God to give meaning to our lives, humans must take on that purpose themselves. This is our ''absurd'' task, like Sisyphus forever rolling his rock up a hill, as the inevitability of death constantly overshadows us. Written during the bleakest days of the Second World War, The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) argues for an acceptance of reality that encompasses revolt, passion and, above all, liberty. This volume contains several other essays, including lyrical evocations of the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran, the settings of his great novels The Outsider and The Plague. Albert Camus (1913-60) is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include The Fall, The Outsider and The First Man. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international. If you enjoyed The Myth of Sisyphus, you might like Camus'' The Outsider, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. ''Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century'' Jean-Paul Sartre

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. "Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus'' three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review "...a new single work for American readers that stands among the very finest."--The Nation

Set in North Africa, Paris, and Brazil, the six stories in this masterful collection reveal probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man’s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society''s expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. They display Camus at the height of his powers. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, Carol Cosman’s new translation recovers a literary treasure for our time. Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

The first novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author lays the foundation for The Stranger, telling the story of an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. In A Happy Death, written when Albert Camus was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man. As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim''s house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time. Translated from the French by Richard Howard

This final volume, recorded over the last nine years of his life, takes on the characteristics of a personal diary.--[book jacket].

‘कालिगुला’ रोमन साम्राज्य के निरंकुश तानाशाह की मर्मांतक कहानी है जो अपने मारे जाने के षड्यंत्रों के बीच भी ''निर्भय'' है। उसकी तानाशाही ने सदाचार को, ईमानदार आदमी को चाबुक पर नचाया है। उसे उन लोगों के चेहरों की मलिनता और गंध बड़ी निकृष्ट लगती है, जिन्होंने न दुःख भोगे न जोखिम उठाए, जो सद्गुणों की जैसे दुकान लगाते हैं, सुरक्षा का स्वप्न ऐसे देखते हैं जैसे कोई युवती प्रेम का। शायद ये इसी भय में अन्ततः मर भी जाएँगे बिना यह जाने कि उन्होंने जिन्दगी भर झूठ बोला है। ये लोग न्यायकर्ता कैसे हो सकते हैं? ऐसी तमाम बातें, तमाम चीजें बेबाकी से सोचनेवाले निरंकुश, क्रूर और अनिष्टकारी कालिगुला को सारी वर्जनाओं के बावजूद किसी महानायक की तरह स्थापित करती चली जाती हैं। कालिगुला की मुक्ति की छटपटाहट और मनुष्य के मनोभावों पर निरपेक्ष पकड़ से ही उसके लिए चाँद जरूरी हो जाता है। वह खुद से कहता है, ‘कालिगुला, तुम भी, तुम भी दंड के भागी हो। किसी से कुछ कम, किसी से कुछ ज्यादा लेकिन इस न्यायाधीशविहीन संसार में जहाँ कोई भी निर्दोष नहीं, कौन हिम्मत करेगा कि मुझे दोषी ठहराए?’

Contemporary scholarship tends to view Albert Camus as a modern, but he himself was conscious of the past and called the transition from Hellenism to Christianity "the true and only turning point in history." For Camus, modernity was not fully comprehensible without an examination of the aspirations that were first articulated in antiquity and that later received their clearest expression in Christianity. These aspirations amounted to a fundamental reorientation of human life in politics, religion, science, and philosophy. Understanding the nature and achievement of that reorientation became the central task of Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Primarily known through its inclusion in a French omnibus edition, it has remained one of Camus'' least-read works, yet it marks his first attempt to understand the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity as he charted the movement from the Gospels through Gnosticism and Plotinus to what he calls Augustine''s "second revelation" of the Christian faith. Ronald Srigley''s translation of this seminal document helps illuminate these aspects of Camus'' work. His freestanding English edition exposes readers to an important part of Camus'' thought that is often overlooked by those concerned primarily with the book''s literary value and supersedes the extant McBride translation by retaining a greater degree of literalness. Srigley has fully annotated Christian Metaphysics to include nearly all of Camus'' original citations and has tracked down many poorly identified sources. When Camus cites an ancient primary source, whether in French translation or in the original language, Srigley substitutes a standard English translation in the interest of making his edition accessible to a wider range of readers. His introduction places the text in the context of Camus'' better-known later work, explicating its relationship to those mature writings and exploring how its themes were reworked in subsequent books. Arguing that Camus was one of the great critics of modernity through his attempt to disentangle the Greeks from the Christians, Srigley clearly demonstrates the place of Christian Metaphysics in Camus'' oeuvre. As the only stand-alone English version of this important work-and a long-overdue critical edition-his fluent translation is an essential benchmark in our understanding of Camus and his place in modern thought.

For the first time in English, "Camus at Combat" presents all of Camus'' World War II resistance and early postwar writings published in "Combat," the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947.

In a series of highly publicized articles in 1952, Jean-Paul Sartre engaged Albert Camus in a bitter public confrontation over the ideas Camus articulated in his renowned work, . This volume contains English translations of the five texts constituting this famous philosophical quarrel. It also features a biographical and critical introduction plus two essays by contemporary scholars reflecting on the cultural and philosophical significance of this confrontation.

As a philosophy teacher, mentor, and friend, Jean Grenier (1898?1971) had an enormous influence on the young Albert Camus (1913?1960), who, in fact, acknowledged that Grenier?s Les Iles had touched the very core of his sensibility and provided him with both a ?terrain for reflection, and a format? that he would later use for his own essays. Their correspondence, beginning when the seventeen-year-old Camus was Grenier?s student at the Grand Lycäe of Algiers, documents the younger man?s struggle to become a writer and find his own voice, a period in which he turned frequently to his mentor for advice, comfort, and direction. The letters cover a period of almost thirty years, from 1932 to Camus?s untimely death in 1960. Because Camus destroyed the earlier correspondence he received, the first twenty-six letters in the volume are his only; the full begins in 1940. ø These enlightening letters offer invaluable glimpses into the development of Camus?s aesthetic ideas, literary production, and political stance. In contrast to the correspondence of Grenier, who throughout remains somewhat reticent about his life and doubtful about himself and his works, Camus?s letters are a window into his most profound thoughts and sensitivities, delving deeply into his psyche and, at times, revealing a side of the writer unfamiliar to us. Undoubtedly they allow us a better understanding of Albert Camus, the man and the artist.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Twenty-three political essays that focus on the victims of history, from the fallen maquis of the French Resistance to the casualties of the Cold War. In the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Albert Camus said that a writer "cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it." Resistance, Rebellion and Death displays Camus'' rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus.

From 1943 to 1947, Albert Camus was editor-in-chief of the famous underground and post-Liberation French newspaper Combat. Among his journalist writings during this period were eloquent essays that grappled with questions of revolution, violence, freedom, justice, ethics, and the emerging social order. The 41 pieces collected here--most never before published in English--tell the story of a sensitive man''s odyssey from "hell to reason" at a time of tremendous upheaval while also providing a missing link between Camus''s pre-war and post-war works. Almost lyrical in their intensity of thought and language, these newspaper pieces show a Camus new to most American readers and are a unique testimony to an extraordinary period in history with parallels to current changes in Eastern Europe. At the time of Liberation in 1944, Camus called for a revolution in French society, including a violent purge of those who had sided with the Nazis. When this turned into a near civil war of personal vendettas and summary executions, he gradually became disillusioned with his hopes for a new society. His later pieces in Combat show him arriving at a more moderate theory of revolt later echoed in such books as The Plague and The Rebel: the individual mattered above all, human life was greater than social goals. "I have come to the conclusion", he wrote, "that men who want to change the world today must choose one of the following: the charnel house, the impossible dream of stopping history, or the acceptance of a relative Utopia that still leaves man the choice to act freely".

Youthful writings of Albert Camus including essays, verse, parables, and fairy tales.

A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus'' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

The Stranger (French: L''Étranger), also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus'' philosophy, absurdism, coupled with existentialism; though Camus personally rejected the latter label. The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture."Weeks after his mother''s funeral, he kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved in a conflict with one of Meursault''s neighbors. Meursault is tried and sentenced to death. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault''s first-person narrative view before and after the murder, respectively. Meursault learns of the death of his mother, who has been living in an old age home in the country. He takes time off from work to attend her funeral, but he shows no signs of grief or mourning that the people around him expect from someone in his situation. When asked if he wishes to view her body, he declines, and he smokes and drinks regular (white) coffee - not the obligatory black coffee - at the vigil held by his mother''s coffin the night before the burial. Most of his comments to the reader at this time are about his observations of the aged attendees at the vigil and funeral, which takes place on an unbearably hot day. Back in Algiers, Meursault encounters Marie, a former secretary of his firm. The two become re-acquainted, swim together, watch a comedy film, and begin to have an intimate relationship. All of this happens on the day after his mother''s funeral. Over the next few days, Meursault helps Raymond Sintès, a neighbor and friend who is rumored to be a pimp, but says he works in a warehouse, to get revenge on a Moorish girlfriend he suspects has been accepting gifts and money from another man. Raymond asks Meursault to write a letter inviting the girl over to Raymond''s apartment solely so that he can have sex with her and then spit in her face and throw her out. While he listens to Raymond, Meursault is characteristically unfazed by any feelings of empathy, so he does not express concern that Raymond''s girlfriend would be emotionally hurt by this plan and agrees to write the letter. In general, Meursault considers other people either interesting or annoying, or feels nothing for them at all. Raymond''s girlfriend visits him on a Sunday morning, and the police get involved when he beats her for slapping him after he tries to kick her out. He asks Meursault to testify that the girlfriend had been unfaithful when he is called to the police station, to which Meursault agrees. Ultimately, Raymond is let off with a warning.