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

“Its relevance lashes you across the face.” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times • “A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. 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 person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: 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, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.

At first it was the dead rats. They started dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph nodes. The citizenry reacts in disbelief when the diagnosis comes in and later, when a quarantine is imposed on the increasingly terrified city. Inspired by Albert Camus’ classic 1948 novel, Kevin Chong’s The Plague follows Dr. Bernard Rieux’s attempts to fight the treatment-resistant disease and find meaning in suffering. His efforts are aided by Megan Tso, an American writer who is trapped in the city while on a book tour, and Raymond Siddhu, a city hall reporter at a daily newspaper on its last legs from the latest round of job cuts. Told with dark humor and an eye trained on the frailties of human behavior, Chong’s novel explores themes in keeping with Camus’ original vision--heroism in the face of futility, the psychological strain of quarantine—but fraught with the political and cultural anxieties of our present day.

Winthropos, the title of George Kalogeris’s new poetry collection, comes from the “Greek-ified” name his father, an immigrant from Greece, gave to the blue-collar New England town where the family lived. Following in the spirit of his acclaimed Guide to Greece, Kalogeris conjures Winthrop, Massachusetts, as a central locus of lyric and elegiac memory. While the poems in Winthropos reach back into the Hellenic past for imagery and inspiration, they often reside in the American present of their conception, forging childhood memory and local custom into a work of meditative power and evocative beauty.

A year into the global pandemic, Gene Fendt repositions the attention of the Western world on a literary classic that bears a vital perspective. Presently, civilization cannot allow itself to think about being better. First it has to survive. Referencing Thomas Merton's claim that Camus' fictional account is actually a "modern myth about the destiny of man" and indication of the blight of "ambiguous and false explanations, interpretations, conventions, justifications, legalizations, evasions which infect our struggling civilization," Fendt makes the case that "modernity itself is a time of plague." Fendt asserts that perhaps "the originality of the modern plague is that most people admit of no symptoms." This chilling likeness to the asymptomatic Covid-19 victim is but one of the images of what the plague stands for in both the novel and contemporary society. The existentialist fiction of Camus is unwrapped by Fendt's fidelity to realism and Camus' motivations as an artist. As Camus calls nihilistic art and culture "barbaric," Fendt calls the barbarian a natural slave. If we are moved by the forces of powers that be without sense or knowledge of a proper end, we too have been rendered worse than ignorant. Beyond the presentation of The Plague as a myth, Fendt also provides generous insight into elements of this work that give an autobiographical portrait of Albert Camus ́ artistic development. He provides an intelligent challenge to labeling Camus an atheist, if Camus is truly the artist Fendt believes him to be. It is also an unlikely but important contribution to the political philosophical study of solidarity.