New Releases by Stuart Gilbert

Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of ''the absurd'' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himself. The dramatic impetus of Cross Purpose, however, comes from the tension between consent to and refusal of man''s absurdity; it is the tragedy of a man who returns home to his mother and sister without revealing his identity to them. By the time of The Just and The Possessed, refusal and rebellion have taken over, and in these overtly political plays (the latter based on Dostoyevsky''s The Devils) Camus dramatizes action and revolt in the name of liberty. Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939. His first two important books, L''Etranger (The Outsider) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he returned to Paris. After the war he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste (The Plague 1947), Les Justes (The Just 1949) and La Chute (The Fall; 1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in a road accident in 1960.

Oran, a large French port on the Algerian Coast, becomes afflicted by the plague. This is the story of a community like any other, suddenly impotent in the face of a destructive force to which it must not submit. Set during the German occupation of World War II.

"Stuart Gilbert''s friendship with James Joyce began in Paris in 1927 after Gilbert read several pages from a forthcoming French translation of Ulysses in the window of Sylvia Beach''s Shakespeare and Company book shop and went in to tell Beach that the translation was poorly done. She reported the encounter to Joyce, who subsequently sought out Gilbert. Their meeting began a literary collaboration and friendship that lasted until Joyce''s death in 1941." "This journal is a chronicle of that remarkable and productive friendship. Stuart Gilbert records many amusing anecdotes and provocative opinions regarding Joyce''s social life, his relationship with his wife, Nora, and his compositional techniques for Finnegans Wake. Also included in the book are some of Joyce''s previously unpublished letters to Gilbert (also reproduced in photographs), numerous unpublished photographs, and a typically dyspeptic 1941 essay on Joyce, Paul Leon, and Herbert Gorman by Gilbert. The volume is fully annotated and contains an introduction by noted Joyce scholar Thomas F. Staley." "These materials from the Stuart Gilbert Archive of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin offer new perspectives on literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. They will be important for everyone interested in the modernist period."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved