Alice Yaeger Kaplan

For decades, French writer, editor, and publisher Roger Grenier has been enticing readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between the art of living and the work of art. Under Grenier's wry gaze, clichés crumble, and offbeat anecdotes build to powerful insights. With Palace of Books, he invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people...

"A National Book Award-finalist biographer tells the story of how a young man in his 20s who had never written a novel turned out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than 70 years later and is considered a rite of passage for readers around the world,"--NoveList. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. If the twentieth century produced a novel that...

"Perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, Albert Camus (1913-1960), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is more relevant today than ever before. Committed Writing brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope of his political preoccupations. Featuring a foreword by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan (author of Looking for the Stranger), this...

"Albert Camus's novel The Plague will go down in literary history as one of the most talked about books of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was "really" writing about his experience of occupied Paris. In 2020, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic...