Hierdie klassieke roman van die befaamde Franse skrywer Albert Camus handel oor die lotgevalle van ’n klompie mense wat in die Algerynse stad Oran vasgekeer word wanneer builepes daar uitbreek. Die hoofkarakter, dr. Bernard Rieux, word die eerste keer bewus van iets buitengewoons wanneer groot klompe rotte vrek in die woonstelgebou waar hy bly. Gaandeweg word hy al meer by die behandeling van die siekes betrek en word hy toeskouer van hoe verskillende mense reageer wanneer toestande al hagliker en benouender word. Sy band met ander mense, soos die toeris Tarrou, die joernalis Rambert en die staatsamptenaar Grand word deur hulle betrokkenheid by die verloop van die pes versterk, terwyl hulle na die sluiting van die stadspoorte al hoe meer bewus word van hulle afsondering en die afwesigheid van geliefdes. Camus se roman is al gelees as allegorie van die besetting van Frankryk gedurende die Tweede Wereldoorlog en die pes kan beskou word as enige bedreiging vir menslike vryheid. Die bedreiging van 'n epidemie soos vigs verleen aan hierdie roman besondere relevansie vir Suid-Afrikaanse lesers.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Jean-Baptiste Clamence - refined, handsome, forty, a former successful lawyer - is in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. He talks of parties and his debauchery, of Parisian nights and the Aegean sea, and, ultimately, of his self-loathing. One of Albert Camus' most famous works, The Fall is a brilliant, complex portrayal of lost innocence and the true face of man.

Albert Camus's lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change-The Stranger, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus's journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal-a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen). Camus's journals from these travels record his impressions, frustrations, joys, and longings. Here are his unguarded first impressions of his surroundings and his encounters with publishers, critics, and members of the New York intelligentsia. Long unavailable in English, the journals have now been expertly retranslated by Ryan Bloom, with a new introduction by Alice Kaplan. Bloom's translation captures the informal, sketch-like quality of Camus's observations-by turns ironic, bitter, cutting, and melancholy-and the quick notes he must have taken after exhausting days of travel and lecturing. Bloom and Kaplan's notes and annotations allow readers to walk beside the existentialist thinker as he experiences changes in his own life and the world around him, all in his inimitable style.

'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' In The Outsider (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal. Albert Camus' portrayal of a man confronting the absurd, and revolting against the injustice of society, depicts the paradox of man's joy in life when faced with the 'tender indifference' of the world. Sandra Smith's translation, based on close listening to a recording of Camus reading his work aloud on French radio in 1954, sensitively renders the subtleties and dream-like atmosphere of L'Etranger. Albert Camus (1913-1960), French novelist, essayist and playwright, is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His most famous works include The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947), The Just (1949), The Rebel (1951) and The Fall (1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and his last novel, The First Man, unfinished at the time of his death, appeared in print for the first time in 1994, and was published in English soon after by Hamish Hamilton. Sandra Smith was born and raised in New York City and is a Fellow of Robinson College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches French Literature and Language. She has won the French American Foundation Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, as well as the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine, each responding in their own way to the lethal bacillus: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame and a few, like Dr Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, Camus’s novel is in part an allegory for France’s suffering under Nazi occupation, and also a story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.

‘An impressive new translation … of this matchless fable of fear, courage and cowardice’
Independent

Translated by Robin Buss with an Introduction by Tony Judt

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also 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

The Myth of Sisyphus is one of the most profound philosophical statements written this century. It is a discussion of the central idea of Absurdity that Camus was to develop in his novel The Outsider. Here Camus poses the fundamental question: Is life worth living? If existence has ceased to retain significance when confronted with the fragmented reality of the human condition, what then can keep us from suicide? Camus movingly 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.

'To create today is to create dangerously' Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot in this powerful speech, accompanied here by two others. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.;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 twentieth-century philosophy with its impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning.

In brand new translations by Ryan Bloom, four theatrical masterpieces from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Outsider and The Plague are brought together for the first time in English, alongside deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue Caligula/The Misunderstanding /State of Emergency/The Just Although renowned for his novels, Albert Camus described the theatre as 'one of the only places in the world I'm happy', and staged the four plays gathered in this collection in Paris between 1944-49. Caligula, his first full-length dramatic work, portrays the monstrous emperor who destroys men, gods and ultimately himself. Here too are The Misunderstanding, a murderous tangle of longing; State of Emergency, where 'The Plague' appears as a central character; and The Just, which explores the limits of political conviction. This new translation brings together Camus's final versions of the plays, along with deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue.

'One of those books that marks a reader's life indelibly' William Boyd 'A compelling, dreamlike fable' Guardian In The Outsider, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal.

L'Etranger has the force and fascination of myth. The outwardly simple narrative of an office clerk who kills an Arab, 'a cause du soleil', and finds himself condemned to death for moral insensibility becomes, in Camus's hands, a powerful image of modern man's impatience before Christian philosophy and conventional social and sexual values. For this new edition Ray Davison makes use of recent critical analysis of L'Etranger to give a full and concise description of Camus's early philosophy of the Absurd and the ideas and preoccupations from which the novel emerges. Davison also discusses the developing pattern of Camus's notion of the art of the novel, his views on 'classicism', simplicity and ambiguity, his fondness for paradox, and his love of everyday situations which yield to mythical interpretation.

Introduction by Peter Dunwoody; Translation by Matthew Ward

A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as 'perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood' of his novels, Albert Camus' The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth. The Fall (1956) is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has glimpsed the hollowness of his existence. But beyond depicting one man's disillusionment, Camus's novel exposes the universal human condition and its absurdities - for our innocence that, once lost, can never be recaptured ... 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 Fall, you might like Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'An irresistibly brilliant examination of modern conscience' The New York Times 'Camus is the accused, his own prosecutor and advocate. The Fall might have been called "The Last Judgement" ' Olivier Todd

'It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of Camus, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product of the wealth - the sensual immediacy and clarity - that had been heaped on his senses' Geoff Dyer Albert Camus was born in a 'world of poverty and sunshine' in Algeria, which would infuse all of his work. This new collection brings together three volumes of Camus' most intimate autobiographical writings for the first time. The Wrong Side and the Right Side, his first book, describes his family and his early years in a working-class neighbourhood. Nuptials rejoices in the sensuality of sun, landscape and sea, while Summer ranges over the cities of Algiers and Oran, nature and identity. Lyrical and emotional, these pieces enrich our understanding of Camus and his love of life.

L'Etranger has the force and fascination of myth. The outwardly simple narrative of an office clerk who kills an Arab, 'a cause du soleil', and finds himself condemned to death for moral insensibility becomes, in Camus's hands, a powerful image of modern man's impatience before Christian philosophy and conventional social and sexual values. For this new edition Ray Davison makes use of recent critical analysis of L'Etranger to give a full and concise description of Camus's early philosophy of the Absurd and the ideas and preoccupations from which the novel emerges. Davison also discusses the developing pattern of Camus's notion of the art of the novel, his views on 'classicism', simplicity and ambiguity, his fondness for paradox, and his love of everyday situations which yield to mythical interpretation.

Camus described this brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt as 'an attempt to understand the time I live in'. Published in 1951, it expresses his horror at the events of a period which 'within fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings'. Hope for the future, he argues lies in revolt, which unlike revolution, is a spontaneous response to injustice and a chance to achieve change without giving up individual or collective freedom .

The Rebel created an irreconcilable rift between Camus and his friend Jean-Paul Sartre who bitterly attacked Camus for his criticism of communism.