Marcel Proust's classic novel Swann's Way is replete with recollections of the distant past. This is the first volume of the acclaimed series: Remembrance of Things Past, also named In Search of Lost Time. Originally written and published in 1909, this premier entry in Proust's series contains some of the finest prose fiction Proust ever authored. Although lengthy, no sacrifice is made with the signature style Proust had cultivated by the time he commenced Swann's Way - recollections are written relentlessly, of places, names, items and other such paraphernalia of life. The narrator gradually builds up a plot surrounding his own life and activities. The titular character, Charles Swann is an associate of the narrator's family who receives particular interest in the story. The first scene recounts a dinner in which Swann was in attendance, noting his characteristics. By stages, a compelling story unfolds with Swann's affections for the former courtesan Odette de Crecy explored.

Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century's most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece. One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois's private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis. Characterized by Fallois as the "precious guide" to understanding Proust's masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust's biographer Jean-Yves Tadie describes as the "sacred moment" when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust's writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called "the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Proust's elaboration of the novel." Like a painter's sketches and a composer's holographs, Proust's folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A "dream of a book, a book of a dream," Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.

Generally agreed to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century - and possibly any other - Proust's masterpiece is here presented in the latest revision to the classic Scott Moncrieff translation. On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrator's journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author's lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Francoise, Saint-Loup and so many others - Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.